


dots and lines

by thisstableground



Series: All Do No Harm/In The Heights crossovers [10]
Category: Do No Harm (TV)
Genre: Autism, Because always autistic Ruben and Usnavi, Considering The Entire Lack Of Seals In Either Canon, Crack, Fluff, Just Like Way More Seals Than You'd Expect, Multi, Seals (Animals), Unless You Count Ruben And I Do
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-03-28 02:00:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 21,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13893852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisstableground/pseuds/thisstableground
Summary: UVR fics from my Tumblr that aren't necessarilyless than ninety degreesverse canon. Mostly ridiculous.1. AU: IMH is in New York, and Ruben has friends to help him deal with Jason's bullshit.2. Ruben has a bunch of cats. It goes badly.3. Ruben's mad science gets a little out of hand.4. Umbrella cocktails.5. Wishing fountain.6. Another high fic.7. Vanessa has a tendency to attract adorable strays.8. Ruben Marcado: Canonically A Seal and I stand by that.9. Usnavi gets the flu.10. Spicy noodle challenge.11. Ruben's sweaters are comforting for everyone.12. It's difficult having sex when you're so goddamn in love.13. Baby stories with the trio14. Baking15. Enter stage window.16. Usnavi tries something new and instantly regrets it.17. Ruben at the aquarium





	1. a happier au

**Author's Note:**

> [a/n: i have a crazy amount of fic on my tumblr that i've never posted here, and my tag system there is a mess so it's all kinda lost to the depths, so here we are! things that i haven't committed to 90-verse canon, either because it's too silly or because it doesn't fit with the timeline. enjoy!]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **re: a discussion about a happier AU for Ruben, where IMH was in New York and he was friends with all the Heights people while Jason was happening. Pre-trio.**

Ruben's only told a couple people the whole truth about the Jason situation, because it's beyond crazy and he did say he'd keep it quiet, and also because it seems pretty harmless until Ian starts coming back. Ruben's finding himself working longer hours and getting more stressed by the second. His only reprieve is the bodega, where he can come to complain about his job and Jason and this shitty gala he had to babysit Ian through last night.

“You  _met_  the other guy? That wasn’t a weird bullshit story you were making up just to fuck with me?” Usnavi says. “What was he  _like_?”  
  
“He locked me in a closet, then he made a really terrible speech, and then he threw my phone in a toilet,” Ruben says. “Sooo…not a big Ian fan. Mostly because of the speech. It was so bad I nearly died just so I could stop hearing it.”

“Maybe that’s why Jason says he’s dangerous,” Vanessa suggests. “He’ll murder you to death by second-hand embarrassment. And he threw your phone in the  _toilet_? Did he at least buy you a new one?”  
  
“What, Ian? I think that would undermine his whole grr-I-am-the-most-bad-guy vibe.”  
  
“I meant Jason,” she says. “Like, sorry for making you deal with my shitty alternate personality, I’m rich and brooding, wah, here’s some compensation for your property and also for the last five years of free fuckin’ work you’ve done for me.”

“Ah, not exactly,” Ruben says sheepishly. “More, y’know, sorry for making you deal with my alternate personality, please do more free work for me. Except he didn’t actually even say sorry  _wait shit hold up you guys_. Is…is Jason an  _asshole_?”

“Hey, he sees the light!” Usnavi cheers. He clinks his coffee cup against Vanessa’s and then raises it to the sky.

“I have literally told you every single day since forever that Jason is an asshole,” says Vanessa. “I sent you a text yesterday saying exactly that. _Are you coming out for Nina's birthday tomorrow, Jason is an asshole, dani sends her love, ex-oh-ex-oh_."

It’s true. She did say that.

“Huh,” says Ruben.

The next day just before Ruben is due to take his lunchbreak, Jason bursts into the lab to be a General Pain In The Ass again, like he does every single fucking day. This time, though, Vanessa and Usnavi are there. Ruben didn't invite them, they just showed up a couple of minutes earlier. He doesn't know why he even bothers having a door, really.

“Ruben, we have work to do,” Jason says, ignoring the other two completely.

Vanessa links her arm through Ruben’s. “I hope you won’t need him to stay late!” she trills, all sweetness. Ruben shivers. It’s kind of terrifying. “That’s why we came by, actually, just to make sure you don’t forget about Nina’s birthday tonight.”  
  
”You told her you’d be there,” Usnavi says, making his eyes all big and puppy-dog. “You  _promised_.”  
  
“Who are these people?” Jason asks suspiciously.

“I’m Vanessa,” she says, and then drapes herself over Ruben’s shoulder and starts playing with his hair. “I’m Ruben’s  _girlfriend.”_

“…You’re kidding,” says Jason. Which, rude. There's no need to sound  _that_  disbelieving. Wow, he really is an asshole.

“Nope,” says Vanessa, and then kisses Ruben far more passionately than the deception really warrants. Ruben tries to look like the kind of person who is totally used to someone as awesome as Vanessa shoving her tongue in his mouth, but since his only point of reference is Usnavi who always pulls away from Vanessa-kisses with such a dumbstruck expression that Ruben sometimes looks to see if there’s little cartoon birds circling his head, he probably doesn’t do a good job of it.

It’s a  _really good_  kiss though. Shame it’s only acting. He’s breathless when she pulls away.

Usnavi coughs awkwardly. “Uh, and I’m Usnavi,” he says. “I’m Ruben’s…Usnavi.”

Ruben sneaks a glance sideways to see if he’s mad about the kiss. Usnavi looks like he’s trying very hard not to laugh.

“I’m afraid we just can’t spare him tonight. We need all our best people and Ruben’s our smartest chemist, the whole place would just grind to a halt without him, haha,” says Jason, in that weird fake talking-to-patients tone he has that makes him sound like he learned how to talk from watching low-budget medical dramas. Also he actually says  _haha_ instead of laughing it, which is unsettling.

“You’re Dr Cole, right?” Vanessa says, and then all of the fake sugar-sweetness drops out of her voice. “I’ve heard  _so much_  about you.”

“Just a whooole buncha stuff,” Usnavi agrees, narrowing his eyes.

Jason gives Ruben a betrayed look. Ruben feels a stab of guilt, then re-evaluates because…what the hell has he ever got out of this? Why should he apologize for sometimes needing to vent about his unpaid second job where the only thanks he gets is more unpaid work and missing out on fun weekend things? He doesn't want to spend the night in the lab again. He wants to go out with his friends and drink weird colorful drinks with half a ton of fruit around the glass and sing happy birthday to Nina with people who aren’t jerks and let Vanessa see how many cocktail umbrellas she can put in his hair and watch Usnavi apologizing to all the people he accidentally hits while he’s doing his weird flailing drunk-dancing.

“I’ll see you on Monday, Jason,” Ruben says.

“But—“

“On  _Monday_. I’m going to take my lunchbreak now.  _Outside_  the hospital. I’d say call me if you need me but, y’know, no phone, what can you do?” Ruben contemplates this. “You owe me a phone, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Dr Cole!” Usnavi yells cheerfully as Ruben grabs them both and walks purposefully out of the door while Jason stares after them, frozen in shock. Vanessa throws a glance over her shoulder to check he’s watching, then shoves her hand in Ruben’s back pocket. He yelps.

“Laying it on a little heavy, aren’t you?” he says in an undertone. “Did Usnavi know this was the plan when you showed up here?”  
  
“I might have improvised just a tiny bit,” she says. “Usnavi’s only jealous I got the fun part, right, Usnavi?”

“I don’t  _have_  to be jealous,” Usnavi says, and slides his hand into Ruben's other back pocket. Ruben makes a strangled noise but, well, he’s not gonna complain. Although actually it’s a very awkward way to try and walk, and they definitely get some odd looks, which makes it pretty weird that they don’t seem in much of a hurry to move their hands even when they’re out of Jason’s eyeline, all the way out of the hospital and to the coffee shop down the street.


	2. ruben with Many Cats

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **tereszi:**  
>  ok my brain went ‘ruben with a cat’ and then ‘ruben with Many cats’ and then ‘ruben, resident cat rescuer gee i hope usnavi isn’t allergic’
> 
>  **me:**  
>  bad news, my friend: ruben is canonically allergic to cats.

 “YOU HAVE TO STOP,” Vanessa yells through the locked door.  


“I WON’T,” Ruben yells back. Or she thinks he does, it’s kinda hard to hear actual words through all the sneezing and the blocked nose. “THEY NEED ME.”  


They hear him sneeze five times in a row, followed by a loud cacophony of clattering and yowling sounds.

“If that was you dying I’m going to be so mad at you,” Vanessa says.  


“I’m fine! I just startled them!”

“Are you  _wheezing_?”

“I took an allergy pill, this is totally unrelated. I’m wheezing about how much I love them. This rash is from  _caring too hard_.”

"Is this a cry for help?” Usnavi calls worriedly from where he’s sitting with his back against the door, down by Vanessa’s feet. “Are you acting out in a self-destructive manner in a misguided attempt to reassert a feeling of control in your life, or maybe because you feel unable to communicate your distress in a healthy way? Ruben?”  


Vanessa looks at him.

“What?” he says defensively. “So I researched some stuff.”

She turns back to the door. “Ruben, this is fucking stupid, you’re going to choke on your own snot in a locked room and the only people at the funeral will be your eleven cats.”

“Then at least I’ll be mourned by the only ones who UNDERSTAND me,” Ruben shouts. “And I have twelve cats, Vanessa, i have TWELVE CATS. Do you even know me at  _all_?!”

  



	3. clone babies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **(re: a throwaway joke in _to the bone_ about ruben and usnavi having a "bunch of big-eyed clone babies".)  
> **  
>  **enigmairi:  
> ** It would be adorable but also probably the stuff of Vanessa's nightmares.

Usnavi and Ruben are both there in Ruben's lab, looking at her with the guiltiest _oh shit we’ve been caught_ expressions Vanessa has ever seen. T here’s babies everywhere. All of them have the biggest, brownest eyes. They’re EVERYWHERE.

“What the hell is this,” she says slowly. Ruben looks sheepish.  


“I made one just to prove that I could, and it made him so happy that I just…kept doing it,” he says, nodding at Usnavi. Usnavi is holding a baby in a little blue sweater. It says “beh” at him. Usnavi bursts into tears.  


“It’s so cute,” he sobs.  


“That’s one of mine,” Ruben says. "You can tell ‘cause of the sweater. Usnavi’s idea.”

“What the hell _is_  this,” Vanessa says again.  


“Clone babies!” Usnavi explains brightly. The little Ruben-baby drools on his shoulder. “Aw, look, he’s just like his papá!”  


“Technically I’m not their father,” says Ruben. “If anything-”  


“We’re not having our army of clone babies refer to you as Creator, Ruben,” says Usnavi severely. “We’ve discussed this.”  


“I’m going home,” says Vanessa. She buys a bottle of good quality vodka on the way.  



	4. six cycle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **prompt: usnavi and vanessa taking care of drunk ruben.**

It’s only supposed to be a lowkey evening out at a small bar, but it  _feels_  pretty big because tonight the unprecedented has occurred: Usnavi, as always, had asked Ruben “are you sure you don’t wanna come?” while he was getting changed and this time Ruben had looked up from his papers, frowned thoughtfully and said “you know what? Fuck it, I will.  I don’t have work tomorrow. And it’s not far to come back if I don’t like it.”

He’d sounded like he was talking himself into it reluctantly, but once they got here he mellowed out pretty well: it’s a Thursday night, not too crowded, a little loud but a warm atmosphere and quiet enough that at least they can hear each other talking, busy enough to be fun but not so busy that it’s overwhelming.  Perfect night for it, and the night so far has been perfect. Mostly of course they’ve stuck pretty close together, but then Usnavi bumped into Julio as he was leaving the bathroom, and ended up following him outside to bum a smoke - look, okay, yes he’s been quit again, but it tastes so good with alcohol, and he was only going out there because he didn’t wanna cut off their conversation halfway through and then one of Julio’s buddies offered him one and…whatever, it’s  _one_  cigarette, everyone’s gonna be too drunk to notice anyway. So he’s been gone for upwards of twenty minutes, which is fine, because Vanessa and Carla and Benny are all here and Ruben’s chill with them.  


Except when he comes back Ruben is where he left him at the bar, but the seats on either side of him that were filled with Carla and Vanessa are empty, Benny still in the next stool over but deep in conversation with the bartender. Ruben’s got a lime wedge in his mouth that he’s sucking on and he’s focused hard on his own hands, which are carefully fitting several straws into the end of other straws to make one extra-long one. To an outsider it would look like he’s just fidgeting to pass the time, but Usnavi knows that face: a look of glazed-over concentration, squinting a little, pink flush across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, that’s a one hundred percent drunk Ruben face.

“Hey, baby, what’s a cute thing like you doin’ in a place like this?” Usnavi says to him, sliding into the empty seat next to Benny, who fistbumps him without looking away from his conversation. “Where’s Vanessa?”

Ruben takes the lime wedge out of his mouth, puts his straws down and says “look,” pushing his glass towards Usnavi.

“Yes, it’s alcohol,” Usnavi observes. “What number’s that one, now?”

“It’s  _destiny_ ,” Ruben says, emphatically, then checks himself. “No. Wait. Density, is what I mean. Density. That’s how they do it all different colors, see? The denser liquids go at the bottom and the others sit on top and that’s how it does a gradient. Isn’t that  _amazing?_ It’s so simple! It’s amazing!”

“Still as amazing as the first time you told me, but what I’m asking is how  _many_?” Usnavi says patiently.

Ruben blinks at him and grabs something else off the bar counter. He holds out his hand, which is now full of paper umbrellas. Usnavi counts them. “Onetwothree— four. Are these all from  _your_  drinks?   _Ruben_!”

He’s been keeping an eye on how Ruben’s been acting but not so much on what he’s been drinking, which as it turns out was maybe was a mistake. Usnavi’s probably being overprotective but it’s so rare that Ruben comes out with them and also he knows for a fact those cocktails are lethal, so maybe actually he’s just being sensible.

“They looked so good, I had to keep ordering more so I could keep looking at them,” Ruben says, tucking the umbrellas into his shirt pocket. “They’re so pretty. Like, like a rainbow with limes and lemons in it. Like you!”

“Are you saying I look pretty, or I look like a rainbow with limes and lemons in it?”

“Yes,” Ruben agrees, and Usnavi blushes, even though he doesn’t feel like looking like a rainbow with limes and lemons in it is necessarily a good thing for a human person who is not a cocktail? But it sounded like a compliment.

“Hey, boys,” says Vanessa, coming up behind him with Carla at her side. “Partying hard? Usnavi, you smell like an ashtray.”

Can’t get nothing past her. “Well,  _you_  smell like a—“ he catches her look and amends whatever he was going to say to “—an angel. A fragrant and lovely angel, except also an angel whose halo is kinda slipping ‘cause you’ve been neglectin’ to keep an eye on our boy.”

“We had to bathroom,” Carla says.

“Simultaneously?”

“That’s just the girl code,” Vanessa says. “It’s a group activity. You wouldn’t understand.”

Usnavi is actually kinda jealous of that unwritten rule. Sometimes he gets bored while he’s in there, y’know? But  _apparently_ it’s not urinal etiquette to strike up a chat, no matter how well you know the person next to you. “Well, okay, but you still left Ruben all alone.”

“He’s with Benny. Anyway, he seems pretty happy to me,” Vanessa says, indicating at Ruben, who hasn’t even noticed she’s there: he’s now leaning over with his expanded straw and putting the end of it in Benny’s beer. Benny does not notice, despite the fact that Ruben is beyond unsubtle. Carla wanders off to talk to someone she knows at another table. “He knows his limits, I’m sure.”

“ _Are_  you sure? ‘Cause he’s drank four of the…whatever they’re calleds. Big gay umbrella cocktail.”

“Is that homophobic?”

“Only if you were the one saying it. I’m allowed to. Besides, I meant because it’s a pride flag in a glass, not because of umbrella cocktail stereotypes. There’s a lot of alcohol in there and he don’t drink very often.”

“Making up for lost time, obviously,” Vanessa says. More than half of Benny’s drink is gone now. She clears her throat pointedly: Ruben finally looks at her, deer in headlights albeit eyes kind of unfocused, but he doesn’t take his mouth off the straw.

“It’s loud in here,” he says around it. “I’m sleepy.”

“I’m not surprised,” says Vanessa, petting his hair. “Time to go?”

“Maybe.” He takes his straw and twiddles with it. Some droplets off the end of it splash onto his jeans, and he rubs a finger over one of the darker patches where it landed. “I can go by myself if you guys wanna stay out longer.”

“No,” Usnavi says. “Come on, lets go find a cab for you to  _please God_  not throw up in if you can help it.”

“…Oh,” Ruben says, and then slumps sadly over the bar, prodding a finger into a puddle of spilled something. “I don’t wanna get a cab. It’s only like a ten minute walk. I can make it that far.”

“Uh-huh,” Vanessa says, disbelieving. “It was ten minutes when your legs are working. Can you even stand upright now?”

“I stand up every  _day_!” Ruben says hotly, shoving himself with great enthusiasm off his barstool. He stays upright all of two seconds before keeling comically slowly into Vanessa’s arms. Well, sort of more into her chest, but her arms are also involved because otherwise Usnavi’s pretty sure Ruben would’ve just slithered entirely to the floor like all his bones have dissolved.

“Smooth,” Vanessa says.

“That was intentional,” Ruben says. “Exactly where I meant to be. The plan I had all along. I  _am_ officially a genius, you know. Behold my greatest invention!”

He brings his arm around and pokes his straw at Vanessa’s face, narrowly missing blinding her with it.

“Well, I’m not carrying you home in my cleavage, Megastraw, so you better get your legs in order.”

To Ruben’s credit, after they say their goodbyes they make it almost all the way to the door with Vanessa and Usnavi only mostly holding him up, but then he topples forward to lean against the wall and says “I’m so  _tired_.”

Vanessa makes a  _this is looking like a problem_  face at Usnavi. Usnavi makes a  _you’re tellin’ me_  face back at her and then says, as gentle as he can, “look. It’s only a couple minutes by car, and it just started raining out too. We’ll both be with you. If—“

“No,” Ruben says, and he sounds fully serious this time. “Nonono, no cab, no backseat. Please don’t make me.”

“Honey, I don’t know how else we’re gonna get you home,” Vanessa says.

“ _Please_ ,” he begs, and of course they both give in.

Vanessa sighs. “Usnavi, what’s our backup plan?”

Well, he doesn’t actually have one, so it takes way too long for him to decide “reinforcements. Gimme a second,” and head back towards the bar.

Benny seems pretty surprised to realise he’s still here. “Changed your mind?”

“I’m calling in a favor.”

“I’m not buyin’ you one for the road,” Benny says. “I don’t know why you always think I’m richer than you. And anyway you always regret it.”

“No, not that,” Usnavi says. “ _That_.” He points at Ruben, who’s sort of wedged between Vanessa and the wall to keep him on his feet, and Usnavi can just about hear him singing “ _I know who I want to take me home! I know who I want to take me home!”_ directly into Vanessa’s face.

“Ah,” says Benny. “Too much fun?”

“Too much alcohol. He don’t wanna get in a cab because it’s one of his Things, but he’s basically dead weight right now. We need an extra pair of arms. I’ll pay you cab fare’s worth if you help me get him home.”

“Nah, don’t be stupid, I don’t need your money. Just let me finish my —oh,” Benny says, noticing his drink is already almost empty. “Damn. Musta drank it without realising.”

“Yeah, that must be what happened,” Usnavi says. He’ll buy Benny one next time they’re somewhere, it’ll balance out.

Benny finishes the last dregs of his beer and says “alright, let’s go.”

“Do you even know any of the other words?” Vanessa’s saying to Ruben as they go back over there.

Ruben thinks for a moment. “ _…You don’t have to go home but you can’t - stay- here!”_  he sings, and then with renewed vigor, “ _I KNOW WHO I WANT TO TAKE ME HOME—“_

“Well, I hope the answer to that is Benny, ‘cause he’s your ride for the night,” Usnavi says.

“Heard you got no legs,” Benny says to Ruben, who tries to shrug and makes an disgruntled sound as the movement scrapes his shoulder against the wall.

“I drank them off,” he says. “It’s a terrible tragedy. I live on this wall now.”

“You get him under one arm and I’ll get the other,” Usnavi says. Benny surveys the scene and says, “or we could just do it this way”, crouching down.

“That’s the opposite of walking,” Ruben says, shooting a look at Vanessa and tilting his head at Benny like _look at this fool_.

“Piggyback,” Benny explains. “Uh, if you want to.”

“I think I probably  _have_  to,” Ruben admits reluctantly. “I’ll return the favor some day.”

“Unlikely,” Benny says, as Ruben silghtly jumps but primarily falls onto his back. Usnavi can hear Carla cheering them on in the background. Ruben whoops back at her. Benny readjusts their position and stands. “Onward!”

“Wow,” Ruben marvels. “You didn’t even stumble. You’re  _strong_.”

“Biceps for days,” Vanessa agrees.

“Well, I work out a little,” says Benny modestly.

“I’m not jealous!” Usnavi says, too loud, and they all look at him. “Uh.”

They start the short walk home. Which, by the way, Usnavi totally could’ve carried Ruben for except he just didn’t  _feel_  like it, okay, so stop bringing it up, Vanessa. Vanessa scoffs and says Usnavi couldn’t even carry  _her_  home. Usnavi argues that Vanessa is in no position to talk because she couldn’t carry any of them.  Vanessa is outraged and says he doesn’t know that, he can’t prove that, she works out too and Usnavi’s only little, so maybe shut up, she’ll piggyback him right now in heels.  _Then_  there’s a brief break while Vanessa and Usnavi untangle themselves and stand back up and brush off their scuffed knees and point accusing fingers at each other, and they all carry on in a slightly more humble way.

“Usnavi,” Ruben says. “Usnavi. Usnavi! Hey, Usnavi, hey! Usnavi!”

“Yeah?

“Look,” he says, and opens one of his little paper umbrellas over Benny’s head. It does absolutely nothing to keep off the rain. “I’m helping.”

And then he dissolves into the dumbest high-pitched giggling Usnavi’s ever heard. He likes it: it makes the rain and the feeling of drunk-turned-tired much more palatable, all just part of the sweet, messy post-night atmosphere.

“You want help getting up the stairs?” Benny asks, outside of Ruben’s apartment building.

“I think I’m okay,” Ruben says. “The rain cleared my head a bit. Thanks for the ride. You are a good friend and very tall.”

“Any time, dude.”

“Thanks, Benny,” Usnavi says. “Sorry for interrupting your night.”

“I was gonna head home around now anyway,” Benny says. “ _Some_  of us have work tomorrow.”

“Hey, I got work tomorrow too,” Usnavi says. “But aite, lemme know when you get back to your place.”

Benny rolls his eyes, like he always does, but fuck that, if Usnavi says it to the ladies then he’ll say it to the dudes too. It’s nice to know when everyone’s home safe: he still sometimes gets a crushing sense of guilt about ditching Vanessa in that blackout without checking on her - what if something had happened?! - and it’s been more than three years since that. She just gets annoyed with him still apologising for that now, but he can’t help it. He wouldn’t want the one night he forgets to be the one night something went wrong.

But Benny is pretty well equipped to deal with any shit that might come his way, so for now Usnavi and Vanessa can turn their attention to making sure Ruben gets home safe, i.e. does not fall down the stairs and break his fucking neck. It’s a stressful process, like trying to guide Bambi across the ice.

“Well, that was hellish,” says Vanessa once they get inside Ruben’s apartment.

“We did it though!” Ruben says. He flings his hands up excitedly, then sways, goes an alarming shade of pale greenish and immediately runs to the bathroom.

“Uh-oh,” Usnavi mutters.

Vanessa follows Ruben into the bathroom to keep an eye on him. Usnavi gets out some sweatpants and a t-shirt for Ruben to change into, tidies some things off his bed, replies to the  _just_   _got home_ text from Benny and lurks around awkwardly waiting for the heaving sounds from the bathroom to stop. By now they’ve learned through various stomach bugs and food poisoning and flu that Ruben prefers Vanessa being the one with him when he’s right in the worst of the confusing, disoriented vomity part of things. And it’s fine, it makes perfect sense that Ruben’s more comfortable around women for some stuff. Doesn’t mean Usnavi likes it, because he hates feeling useless especially when people are sick, but he tries not to take it personally.

Once it seems like it’s safe, Usnavi knocks.

“I’m all good,” Ruben says weakly. “Join the party.”

Usnavi comes in, sits down with his back against the tub. Ruben’s still kneeling on the floor looking pretty awful, Vanessa’s next to him stroking her fingers through his limp hair. Usnavi grabs the mouthwash and passes it over.

“Thanks.”

“Feel better now?” Vanessa asks kindly.

Ruben spits the mouthwash into the toilet bowl and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “It was just the sugar. All that orange juice and grenadine and whatever. Fruit juice is a bad mixer, nearly as bad as soda. Sugar crash’ll get you before the hangover.”

“Nothing at all to do with the four different types of alcohol in there, huh?”

“Nope.” He hides his face in the crook of his elbow against the seat of the toilet. “I look like shit, right?”

“Yup,” Usnavi confirms. “You’re all sweaty and you’ve gone a super weird color.”

“Alright, I didn’t ask for details.” He lifts his head and inhales like he’s about to speak, then just says “nah” and drops back down again.

“What?”

“I was gonna tell you something but I’m sober at least enough to know how fuckin’ drunk it’ll make me sound.”

“You’ve committed now.”

Talking muffled into his elbow, Ruben says, “I’ve just never known anyone else who’d ditch a bar to hang out on a bathroom floor with me while I threw up in five different colors. Or anyone who I actually had fun at a bar with even without that. You’re my best friends, you know? Like,  _ever_.”

Oh no, he’s  _adorable_. Usnavi inadvertently makes a stupid  _aaaaaww_  sound.

“That’s what we’re here for. And I’ve been to way worse parties than this,” Vanessa says. “If you’re done hurling think it’s time to call it a night for real though, babe.”

Ruben turns his head to the side so he can look blearily at them, kinda pathetically. “Will you stay with me even though I’m gross and I make bad decisions?”

“Of course we will,” Usnavi says. “Ain’t like that’s anything we didn’t already know.”

“…Will you make me some toast?”

“Now you’re pushing your luck,” Vanessa says.

“But  _will_  you?”

“…Yes,” she says. “But only because if we soak up more of the drunk you’ll be less of a nightmare tomorrow.”

“I’m a fucking treasure, actually,” Ruben says, flipping her off.

And he sort of really is, but Usnavi’s a hundred percent sure that’s the kind of sappy thing that if he says it aloud they’ll tease him for weeks, so he just stretches his legs out to push his feet up against Ruben’s in lieu of hugging him, and Vanessa rests her hand on Usnavi’s ankle. And turns out Vanessa was right: even with the vomiting and the fact that Usnavi’s ass is way too skinny to be comfortable on the tiled floor for this long and the general bathroom vibe, as far as parties go, this is still a pretty damn good one.


	5. wish

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **prompt: usnavi, ruben and vanessa at a wishing fountain**

Ruben's got the coins in his upturned palm for them all to pick from, but he's neglecting the fountain in favor of telling them that "of course, wishing fountains don't actually work."

“Well, thanks, Dr Buzzkill,” Vanessa says. “You wanna go to the mall next, tell all the kids lining up to see Santa that it’s physically impossible for him to travel round the world that fast?”  


“That’s different. Santa has  _magic_ ,” Ruben says, scathingly. “This fountain just has unfulfilled hopes and probably E.coli.” He drops another coin in. “Grant my wishes, fountain of capitalism, I wish that Vanessa would stop throwing all the money none of us can spare into you.”

Vanessa slaps the bottom of Ruben’s hand upwards. All of the coins tumble out into the water at once with a series of pretty tinkling splashes.  


“See? Didn’t come true,” says Ruben, smug.  


“Well, it ain’t _gonna_ work with an attitude like that,” says Usnavi. “Vanessa, you just wasted like twenty wishes. I don’t know why I try and do romantic things with you two.”  


“Just get ‘em out and try again,” Vanessa says. “It’s not cheating the system if you didn’t make a wish on them to begin with.”  


Usnavi looks at the fountain.

“Usnavi, do not get in the fountain,” says Ruben. “I said about the probably E.coli, right? You heard that?”  


“He did say about the probably E.coli,” Usnavi tells Vanessa.  


“Yeah, but Usnavi,” says Vanessa. “What if you get in the fountain?”  


Usnavi contemplates for a moment, then jumps up onto the low wall surrounding the water.

“Uh, no?” says Ruben.  


“She’s got a point, Ruben,” says Usnavi, standing carefully on the slippery tiles. “What  _if_  I get in the fountain?”  


“It’s the middle of December _._ ”  


“It ain’t that co- ¡hijo de puta it’s fucking freezing!  _¡Mierda!_ ” Usnavi shivers violently and does a little too-cold dance in the knee-high water, then frowns at the coins shifting and shimmering around his feet. “Wait, I can’t tell which ones are ours, you reckon it’ll make a difference if I pick up ones that have already been wished on as long as it's about the same amount? Like, we technically paid for the wish.”  


“I can tell you for sure that it won’t make even the tiniest difference,” says Ruben. “Except that if you put your hands in that water it’ll make a big difference to you not having cryptosporidiosis.”  


“ _Doctor Buzzkill, gimme the news_ ,” Vanessa sings. “ _Y_ _ou got a bad case of killin’ buzz!_ ”  


“That doesn’t rhyme-”  


“Sir? Sir! Please step out of the fountain! you aren’t supposed to be in there!”  


“Shit!” Ruben says, instinctively grabbing Vanessa’s hand and breaking into a fast jog-walk away from the fountain.  


“Traitors!” he can hear Usnavi shout behind him. It’s immediately followed by a loud, Usnavi-sized splash and a loud, Usnavi-sized shriek.  



	6. high

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **a different "first time getting high" fic than the 90-verse one but i never finished this. also incidentally the thing that kicked off my realization that[ruben is basically a seal.](https://thisstableground.tumblr.com/post/163525051646/look-im-just-saying-a-classic-fool)**

 

Vanessa folds herself into Ruben's lap and puts a hand over his face. He bats it away. “Where the hell is Usnavi?” she asks. “He’s been gone forever.”

Good question. Ruben twists around awkwardly trying to pull his phone out of his pocket, then dials. Usnavi picks up straight away.

“Yo, Ruben! It’s Usnavi!”

“I know that,” he says. “I’m the one who called you.”

“Oh, yeah. What’s up?”

Ruben looks confused for a second, then looks to Vanessa for help. “Why were we calling Usnavi?”

“Snacks. And to make sure he didn’t die on the way to the bodega. Mostly snacks.”

“Right, right. Snacks, and are you dead, and snacks?”

Usnavi starts laughing. “Fuck!”

“What have you been  _doing_  this whole time?”

“I forgot why I came down, I just started cleaning the store. Hold up, I’ll be right back.”

“Ruben,” says Vanessa. “Ruben, listen, Ruben, this is very important. Maybe the most important.”

“Wait, Usnavi, Vanessa’s saying something very important.”

“The most important.”

“Vanessa’s saying something the most important.”

“Oooh,” says Usnavi. “What is it?”

“You ever think about how seals are just like, the dog version of mermaids and get real fucked up about it?”

Ruben blinks. “Almost never.”

“Ruben! What was the important thing?” demands Usnavi.

“Seals are dog mermaids.”

Usnavi’s silent as he takes that in. Then he whispers, “oh my  _god_ ” and hangs up without saying goodbye.


	7. moon river

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **enigmairi:  
> **  
>  Which animals does Vanessa feel like she has a deep, inexplicable connection with?

Vanessa’s not much of an animal person, really. not the way Usnavi is, Usnavi who has named all of the stray cats that hang around outside the bodega and will unfailingly pet every single one every single day despite it meaning he has to change clothes before he can go anywhere near Ruben, and who has been banned from watching those animal hospital shows because nobody can deal with the consequences if something dies.

And not the way Ruben is, Ruben who isn’t as susceptible to all animals as Usnavi but who does have some kind of weird spiritual experience every time he sees a picture of a seal, ever since that one time they went to the aquarium. Or the points of crossover, like when Vanessa found Usnavi with his eyes a little too big and shiny staring at his phone. “What’s up,” she’d asked, and Usnavi had shown her a photo of a seal and said “it just looks so much like Ruben”  and then hidden his face against the sofa cushions for about five minutes. She suspects he might have been crying. To be fair to him, he had just pulled a ten-hour shift on about four hours of sleep, and it  _did_  kind of look like Ruben, but even so. It’s excessive.

It’s not that she hates animals. It’s just she doesn’t get the big deal. Dogs are nice to pet, there’s some fucked-up shit in the ocean that she’s pretty fascinated by whenever Ruben puts on a documentary, but she’s not gonna lose her mind over them. And especially she doesn’t get pets. They’re just babies with more hair that never get old. She doesn’t need that sort of responsibility.

Or anyway that’s what she’s been trying to explain, telepathically, to the stray cat that jumped in through her kitchen window from off the fire escape. It’s an unkempt, black, fluffy mess of a thing and she doesn’t want to pick it up, because it looks kind of pissed off, so she’s trying to just be passive aggressive until it goes away. She turns away to carry on washing dishes and pointedly ignores it, and somehow the more she ignores it the less angry it seems to be, until it’s winding itself round her ankles and making expectant noises around her feet.

“Fuck off,” she says, not loudly. She doesn’t want to scare it, but like hell is she going to feed it. She pushes it gently with her foot.

It skitters a couple of feet away and stands there looking uncertain. Vanessa looks at the cat. The cat looks at Vanessa. It tips its head to one side and then tips it to the other, the way Usnavi does when he’s trying to figure something out.

“Mrawwwwlll,” it says, melancholy.

“…Fine,” she relents. “I will feed you _once_. But don’t come back here expecting more, and don’t you tell anyone about this, either. And don’t tell anyone I’m talking out loud to a cat.”

***

Ookay, so it’s not that Vanessa  _likes_  the cat, or wants to keep the cat, or has any kind of investment in the cat. It’s just that it keeps showing up. And she might not be an animal person, but it’s small and kind of scrawny and she can’t just let it be hungry.

And so what if she feeds it sometimes? She’s not a fucking monster. But she also knows exactly how much the boys will tease her if they think she’s being all softhearted, so she doesn’t bother to mention it when they come over to her place that weekend.

What she does forget is—

“ _A_ _choo!_ ”

Shit.

Ruben sneezes four more times, extremely loudly, and then comes out of the kitchen to stand in the doorway of the living room, his accusing look kind of ruined by his streaming eyes.

“…You sick or something?” Vanessa asks, casually.

“Do you have a cat you haven’t told me about?” he asks, straight to the point. Then he sneezes so violently he hits his head on the doorframe. “Mother _fucker_ , ow.”

“A stray got in there earlier,” she says. “I forgot you were allergic. Sorry. Are you okay?”

“Oh, peachy keen,” he says, rubbing at his forehead and sniffing. “I’m not going back in that kitchen until you disinfect the whole place, though. Someone else can be on cooking duty tonight.”  
  
Usnavi offers, but Vanessa, feeling maybe just a little guilty (because Ruben looks like shit) takes over.

The cat mews at the window while she’s in there.

“No,” she says. “You can’t come round any more.”

Eventually the cat gives up and wanders off. She doesn’t feel sad about it though. It doesn’t weigh on her mind.

***

It doesn’t weigh on her mind, but it does come back the next day, after the guys have left, and she means to stop letting it come in but it looks so hopeful that she eventually sighs and opens the window.

It’s fine, though. She just starts putting food out in a bowl on the fire escape if she knows Ruben’s going to visit that day, and once or twice she’s had to scrub down the kitchen in a rush. But nobody’s any the wiser, and the cat keeps coming back, looks happy and healthy and getting chubbier and chubbier every day. Actually, it’s looking straight-up overweight. She might be overfeeding it. Or maybe it just does this same routine around a lot of apartments, which, respect to it if so. She knows some people think cats are disloyal for shit like that but hey, if its an option why the fuck not make the most of it? Seems pretty sensible to her.

And she’s not heartless, animals need affection just like people, so of course she’ll pet it sometimes. It seems pretty well-trained - she thinks it must’ve been a pet that somebody left behind, because people are fucking jerks and if they can’t handle the responsibility they shouldn’t have got the damn thing in the first place instead of leaving it to starve, what the fuck is  _wrong_  with humans sometimes - it seems well-trained, so sometimes she doesn’t bother picking it up and putting it outside when she goes to bed, just leaves it in the kitchen with the window open. It’s always disappeared by morning, which Vanessa is fine with. She doesn’t like pets. She’s not even named it. It’s just a cat that sometimes happens to be in Vanessa’s apartment, she’s not like, attached or anything.

***

One day the cat doesn’t show up.

Vanessa doesn’t worry about it. She leaves a bowl out on the fire escape and when she checks the next morning and the bowl is still full, she still doesn’t worry about it, definitely not for the whole time she’s at work and right up until evening.

She goes to check every so often, and the window’s wide open, but the kitchen is empty.

“Fucking whatever,” she says. It’s just a cat. It’s not even her cat.

She’s in a perfectly normal mood when Usnavi shows up and says “damn, who pissed in your cheerios, querida?”

“I’m  _fine_ ,” she says.

Usnavi keeps needling her about it til she throws a cushion at him, at which point he grumbles off to the kitchen to make coffee since Ruben’s arriving any minute anyway. Vanessa crosses her arms and slouches in her seat and scowls at the floor.

There’s a knock - Ruben always knocks even though he has a key - before the front door clicks and slams as he lets himself in, yelling “hey, it’s just me!”

“Don’t go in the living room, Vanessa tried to assassinate me!” Usnavi yells back, and she can hear him go to meet Ruben in the hallway. “Hey, there.”

“Hey, you. And why, what did you do to her?”

“Why do you assume I  _did_  something?” Usnavi asks, affronted.

“Just seemed like a reasonab—achoo!”

Vanessa sits up straight.

Ruben sneezes again. And then twice more, and then makes an unhappy “nnyhhgh” sound, and then sneezes again. Vanessa runs into the hallway.

“What the fuck,” Ruben mutters to himself, wiping his eyes on his sleeve.

“Hey, Vanessa-“ Usnavi begins, but she’s busy looking around. Where, where—oh! the tiny barely-a-cupboard, more just a little nook with room to hang a couple coats. The door is ever so slightly ajar. And there, on a jacket that ew, probably she’ll never be able to wear again, is the cat, and four tiny little kittens. She doesn’t know how it even got in there.

“ _T_ _here_  you are,” she says, crouching down.

Usnavi leans over her shoulder and makes noise like a dying dolphin. “Oh my god loooook,” he whispers.

Ruben looks, sneezes, makes a slight rattly sound when he inhales, and immediately runs to shut himself in the living room.

"This is all extremely adorable,” he shouts wheezily through the closed door. “Is this your way of telling me you don’t want me to come over any more, Vanessa?”

Vanessa ignores him, stares down at the little huddle on the floor of the tiny cupboard.

“Since when do you have a cat?” Usnavi asks, in a soft voice.

“I don’t,” she says. “It’s just a stray that sometimes shows up. It doesn’t even have a name, it’s not like I care.”

And she absolutely does not care. Not enough to let the cat stay in her cupboard while she finds someone she knows who can look after them together all till they’re all old enough to be rehomed, even though it means Ruben can’t stay over for the three weeks it takes to find somewhere. And not enough to stand in the doorway of the empty cupboard for a while after they’re gone, or to glance up out of the window out of habit every time she does the dishes.

She definitely does not care enough to jump a little and say “oh!” when several weeks later there’s a mewing sound from the window and there’s a dumb, scruffy black cat with a brand new collar waiting for her to let it in. It looks well-fed still, so whoever owns it now must be taking care of it.

She fumbles open the window and the cat jumps in, onto the counter and then down to the floor where it rubs against Vanessa’s leg. There’s a little metal circle jingling on the collar, and she figures there’s probably a name inscribed on there, whatever the new owners decided it should be. She doesn’t bother to check.


	8. dog mermaids

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **three incredibly dumb mini-fics about ruben marcado and that whole seal thing.**

** [prompt: "Do you think it could be possible for Usnavi, Vaness and Ruben to adopt a baby seal, cause Ruben legit needs a baby seal"] **

* * *

 

“Aite,” says Usnavi. “I’m super gross, I'm gonna go use your shower.”

“‘kay,” says Ruben absent-mindedly, still watching tv. Vanessa gives a distracted wave.

Thirty seconds later there’s a deep, offended barking noise and a high pitched shriek.

“What the shit was that?!” yells Vanessa, and Ruben yells “FUCK, WAIT, NO”, catapulting himself off the sofa and running towards the bathroom, and Usnavi yells “THAT DEFINITELY WASN’T ME SCREAMING AND RUBEN HAS A SEAL IN HIS BATHTUB”.  
  
“What?! ” says Vanessa, following Ruben to the bathroom where Usnavi is pointing accusingly into the tub. There is definitely, undeniably a seal in there. It’s small and white and fluffy and has a little black patch of fur around its mouth like a beard, and it rolls over and gives another incongruously deep bark, followed by some squeaky disgruntled noises. It’s the cutest goddamn thing Vanessa’s ever seen. She sort of resents it for that.

“Ruben,” Usnavi says. “Care to explain what the fuck?”

“It’s a seal,” says Ruben, unhelpfully.

“Yeah, thanks, Dr Obvious, where the hell did you get it?”

Ruben’s eyes flicker shiftily around.

“Did you steal it?” Vanessa asks. Ruben does not answer. “Oh my god, you did! You  _stole_  it. Why?! ”

“It’s a therapy seal?” Ruben tries. “For the trauma.”

Usnavi shakes his head. “You gotta stop playing that card, man. Yesterday you said I had to make you dinner because you have trauma. And the day before that. And twice last week. Wait, how do I keep falling for this?”

“Well, I do have trauma!” says Ruben. “And now I also have a seal. To, uh, help.”

“How will a seal in your bathtub help anything?”

“Because,” says Ruben. “ _Look_  at him.”

The seal fixes them them with a dark, big-eyed stare. Ruben picks it up and cuddles it, cooing nonsensical maternal babble at it. The seal says “ffbhhsh”.

Usnavi starts to make a quiet, high pitched sound in the back of his throat.

“Look away, Usnavi,” says Vanessa, firmly. “Don’t let them bewitch you. Be strong.”

Ruben looks at Usnavi. His eyes go all wide and shiny and pleading too. Usnavi visibly caves.

“Usnavi!” says Vanessa, exasperated. “Am I the only one with any sense around here? Ruben, you can’t raise an illegal seal in the bathtub in your apartment, that’s insane.”

All three of them look at her.

“…Aw, fuck,” she says, defeated.

 

* * *

** [ Anonymous:  
What would the seal's name be? **

** me:  
i get the feeling that ruben, much like me, is incredibly terrible at naming things, and he calls the seal “Seal”. ] **

* * *

 

“You can’t call it that,” says Usnavi disapprovingly. “That’s like having a dog and calling it Dog _.”_  


Ruben frowns. “What’s wrong with Dog? I don’t see a problem with that.”

“It’s like having a kid and calling it Human Child,” Usnavi rephrases.  


Ruben gives him a blank  _I don’t get your point_  look.

 

* * *

 **[Anonymous:**  
** two words: bodega seal.] **

* * *

 

“Usnavi!” Ruben hisses. “You can’t bring my seal down to the bodega. I’m not supposed to have him, you’ll get us all in trouble.”

“But he’ll be  _lonely_ ,” Usnavi says. “I wouldn’t wanna just hang out in a bathtub by myself all day, why should he? Nobody will even notice. I gave him a disguise.” 

“What, you think people are gonna look at him and say  _oh, I thought that was an illegal bodega seal, but he’s wearing a human’s hat, I must have been wrong_?”

Whatever Usnavi’s answer is gets cut off by the door from the back stairs opening with that loud, unhappy thud that means Vanessa has woken up earlier than she wanted to. In a despairing voice she says “why is morning?”

Usnavi rushes to get her coffee ready. Vanessa stands in front of the counter swaying slightly. She’s wearing a pair of Usnavi’s boxers and a t-shirt that is both inside-out and back to front. W hen Usnavi puts the paper cup down in front of her, she grabs it and says “thanks, Usnavi,” directly to the seal.

“Fbbhshshh,” the seal answers, peering out at her from under Usnavi’s hat. “Aaaa! Ffbhbfh.”  


“Fuckin’ tell me about it,” she agrees.


	9. flu

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **prompt: What about Ruben and Vanessa taking care of/convincing a very sick Usnavi that he is in fact, very sick and should be resting, nor working.**

 

The thing is with Usnavi, between his frequently terrible sleeping habits and occasionally all-candy nutritional choices and his permanent pathological refusal to do anything even approaching the concept of relaxing it can be hard to tell when he’s just a normal wreck versus when he’s actually sick.

He’s been under the weather all week and Vanessa’s starting to suspect the latter, especially today: he’s been sniffing loudly and clearing his throat all night, and there’s a certain tightness round his eyes. She watches him bring his fingertips up to his temple and press them in hard for the millionth time. When she asks, Usnavi says  “I’m just tired.”

That’s what he says about everything, no matter what the problem is. Like she wouldn’t notice him popping painkillers right next to her, but whatever.  

“If you’re not feeling good you should maybe sleep in tomorrow, call Sonny to open.”

“He’s out with his mom all day tomorrow. I ain’t calling him in, she’s not had a Saturday off to spend with him in months and he’s real excited.”

“You could—“

“I’ll be fine. It’s just a little bit of a cold. No big.”

“Alright then.”

He always gets irritable if she needles him too much (which is also true when it’s the other way round, so she can’t complain about that).  Vanessa doesn’t like babying him anyway because she’s his girlfriend not his fucking caregiver, so they’ve got an unspoken  _ask once, maybe twice, then drop it unless it’s serious_  policy that works pretty well for them. But it’s still really fucking annoying that he never just admits it.

Ruben - at his place for the evening, else she’d be exchanging exasperated glances with him for sure - has yet to get properly ill around them. She wonders what he’s like when he is. Hopefully less fucking difficult about it, but actually thinking about it,  _I’m fine it’s fine my head just literally exploded all over the walls but seriously don’t worry about me_ seems fitting forhim too. She subtly taps her foot against the coffee table, as a touch wood that she doesn’t ever have to deal with them both coming down with something at once.

She’s ninety-nine percent sure it’s not just tiredness, though. There’s some kind of flu going round: Dani spent all of last week in bed, and Vanessa’s pretty sure she can feel it creeping up on her too, slowly. A little extra heaviness in her limbs and a little more sleep than she’d usually need, which is already quite a lot, if she’s being honest. So once they go to bed, earlier than usual, she’s deep under for the whole night.

***

The next morning, despite a solid eight hours of sleep, Vanessa’s still pretty pissed to be shaken out of it by her phone ringing.  Usnavi’s not there, so he must already be at work.

“Yeah?” she says, not checking caller ID to see if it’s work or social before she picks up, which is probably gonna backfire on her one of these days. Give her a break, she’s only just woken up. Luckily the person on the other end forgoes polite hellos too.

“You should know, I just went to the store.”

It’s Camila. Vanessa frowns and sits up, squinting at the clock - it’s not even seven yet. Ugh. “Uh, okay?”

“Make that ridiculous disease-ridden boy of yours close up shop and get some rest,” Camila says bluntly. “I’m making him soup. If he’s not in bed by the time I bring it over I’ll be very disappointed in both of you, and you do  _not_  want that to happen.”

“Camila, if you wanna tell me how the hell to make Usnavi stop working when he doesn’t want to, I’ll give you my next month’s salary. I already told him last night he should take the day, but he says it’s just a cold.”

“A likely story,” Camila says, and then with the tone of someone dropping a giant bombshell, “he made my coffee wrong.”

“…I’ll go check on him.”

***

Down in the store she hangs back before she goes to drag Usnavi away because he’s with a customer. It looks like he’s having some trouble trying to count out change, frowning down at the cash register and poking sort of aimlessly at the money in there.

“That’s. Uh. That’ll be,” he pauses. “Um. That’s five—no, four. No, five…forty,—fuck! Uh, sorry.”

“Five thirty-five change.”

“Yeah, that’s probably right,” he says. “Gracias.”

“Um, this is only five ten.”

“Shit, sorry.” He opens up the register and sighs quietly to himself.

“Are you okay, dude?” the customer asks, pocketing the rest of the change as Usnavi passes it over.

“Just a bad math day,”  Usnavi says, with a weak smile.

“Hey, happens to us all sometimes.”

As the customer leaves the store, Usnavi grabs a little bottle of hand sanitiser and applies it like he’s prepping for a surgery or something, front and back all the way to the wrist and carefully between each finger, fastidious to an extent that Usnavi never usually is. He’s so focused on it he doesn’t even notice her coming up to the counter till she says “morning.”

The smile he aims her way is way more genuine than the one he gave the customer. “Hey, querida. You’re up early.”

“Camila’s instructed me to quarantine you,” she says, and he sighs again.

“Of course she has,” he says. “Big fuss over nothin’, as always.”  
  
“Last time you said that you ended up with a chest infection for two weeks.” God, he looks awful close up, way worse than last night. His eyes are glassy-bright and he’s sickly pale apart from the visible fever-red splashed across his cheeks,but he’s wearing a hoodie over his shirt like he’s cold, and bouncing on his toes in way that’s more manic than energetic. “You really should—“

“You want coffee?” he interrupts. “I’ll make you coffee. And I’ll make me coffee too, that’s all I need, just a little bit of a kick to get me back on the right track.”

“No, I don’t—“

“Lots of cream, lots of sugar, a little bit of cinnamon, perfect way to start the day,” he rambles. “I won’t even charge you.”

“You shouldn’t be working.”

“Store won’t pay for itself. Gotta chase that paper,” he says. “Gotta keep the customers happy, gotta make the coffee, gotta keep—¡mierda!”

His hands slip as he opens the lid of the coffee grounds, and half the tin spills over the floor. “Shit,” he says with feeling, and then his lip starts trembling.

“Hey, it’s okay, it’s just coffee,”  Vanessa says. “Are you okay?”

“It’s fine. I’m fine. Can everyone just get off my back?” he snaps, but she doesn’t have time to be offended because then he says, “I don’t feel good,” and sits suddenly on the floor, surrounded by the spilt coffee grounds.

“For God’s sake,” she says, coming round to crouch next to him, “of course you don’t feel good, look at you. Did you even take anything before you got up at ass o’clock in the morning and came down here, you idiot?”

“Took a whole buncha stuff plus three cups of coffee. Nothing worked. I  _really_  don’t feel good, Vanessa.”

“A bunch of what stuff?” she says, but he just makes a vague shushing motion and leans his head back against the wall behind him, closing his eyes.

It’s probably just the illness but in this state she doesn’t entirely trust him to not follow some kind of  _if I take twice as much it’ll work in half the time_  logic. Time to get some medically qualified reassurance.

“I’m calling Ruben,” she says.

***

It only takes Ruben five minutes to get from his apartment to the store - of course he was already awake - and Usnavi had startled out of his very brief catnap even before that, but Vanessa still feels a little tense hovering around while Ruben patiently quizzes Usnavi on what medicine he took. Usnavi mumbles out some inaudible answer and pulls two unboxed blister-packets of pills out of his jeans pocket, throwing them at Ruben.

“Also cough medicine,” he adds.

Ruben takes it in his stride and picks up the packets to read the label.

“Alright. Which cough medicine?”

“Robitussin? I think?”

“Ah. Well, that’ll be it then,”  Ruben says, standing up straight again. “It’s not gonna cause any long-term problems so don’t worry about it, the Benadryl just exacerbates the dextromethorphan in the cough medicine so you’re probably feeling kind of trippy from that. But if you wanted to run a store or do like, anything that isn’t lying down then mixing those two plus a fever plus way too much caffeine in one go is just asking for trouble. You can’t just coffee away a virus.”

“I don’t have a fever,” Usnavi says.

“All the fever symptoms would beg to differ,” Vanessa says, and Usnavi scowls.

“I’m not sick. I’m just tired. And also maybe hallucinating a little? Everything sounds like colors, is that normal?”

“No,” Ruben says. “Go to bed. Doctor’s orders.”

“You’re not a body doctor,”  Usnavi points out. “You do chemicals.”

“Body’s full of chemicals,”  Ruben says. For someone who’s really not a body doctor, he’s got a pretty good bedside manner, by which Vanessa means it’s impressive that he’s not yelled at Usnavi for being a stubborn pain in the ass yet. “And in your case, also full of the plague. You’re gonna make your customers sick if you stay at work, you know that?”

“I’ve been keeping my hands clean,” Usnavi protests. “I got hand sanitizer, I’ve been using it all the time before I touched anything. It’s making my hands itchy. I don’t like it.”

“That wont do anything for the airborne part of it anyway,”  Ruben says. “You’re breathing all over this store and handling food.”

There’s obviously something in his calm, clinical tone that’s getting through, because Usnavi hums and says. “I guess that makes sense…do you really think I’m making people sick?”

Vanessa makes a  _tread carefully_  face at Ruben, who looks bewildered. She can’t tell if that’s because he doesn’t get why or if he just can’t work out what expression she’s doing, so she shakes her head. Usnavi’s real sensitive about this kinda thing: playing on other people’s health is a better angle than trying to persuade him to look after his own, but it can backfire too, because if he gets it in his head that he’s made someone else sick he’ll insist on playing nurse for them till he literally passes out. Ruben shrugs minutely.

“I think the chances of spreading it increase the longer you’re in here,” he says cautiously. “And you’ll be sick for longer if you don’t rest properly, so that’ll increase it too.”

“Vanessa?” Usnavi asks, like she’s gonna say  _no actually I totally think you should do a ten-hour shift on your feet and get your flu-breath all over the entire barrio._

“Listen to the science man,” she says. “Also, Camila says she’ll have my head if you aren’t sleeping by the time she brings soup round and the clock’s running out on that, so like, for my sake if not yours.”

“Oh, Camila’s making soup?” Usnavi says, brightening a little. “Camila makes awesome get-better soup. It’s nearly as good as Abuela’s used to be.”

“You won’t get any if she finds out you’re still here.”

“ _Fine_ ,” Usnavi relents. “But I’m opening again tomorrow no matter what.”

“Sure,” she says. “I’ll be right up, just gonna clean this mess up and close the store.”

Once Ruben and Usnavi have disappeared through the back together, Vanessa takes out her phone and texts Sonny telling him that he’s running the store solo tomorrow. Sometimes it’s necessary to go over Usnavi’s head. Usnavi wouldn’t approve, but Vanessa’s sure Abuela Claudia would have done the same, so she doesn’t feel even a little guilty about doing it.

***

Usnavi’s already in bed by the time Vanessa gets upstairs, so her and Ruben take to the couch to read while keeping their ears pricked for any signs of movement. Vanessa puts her legs across Ruben’s lap, and he rests his book against them. Things are silent for all of half an hour until there’s the creak of a door and the sound of soft, sock-clad footsteps in the hallway.

“So help me god, if you’re trying to go to work…” Vanessa warns, leaning out into the hall. Usnavi is sitting on the floor, about to put his shoes on. He looks up at her half-bewildered and half-guilty like he knows been caught doing something wrong but isn’t quite sure what.

“No?” he says. He may well be sleepwalking: he’s not even changed out of his pajamas, though he did take the time to put his hat on.

She folds her arms and stares at him. His shoulders slump and he takes himself back to the bedroom.

“You got that right,” she grumbles.

***

About ten minutes later Usnavi appears in the doorway of the living room.

“Go back to  _bed_ ,”  Ruben and Vanessa say in chorus.

“I threw up,” Usnavi says. “On  _everything.”_

“Awesome.”

***

Ruben changes Usnavi’s sheets while Vanessa gets Usnavi to sit on the floor of the shower so he won’t fall over, and he spends the whole time quietly dozing while Vanessa does all the cleaning off for him. Fingers crossed that means he’s exhausted enough to stay put this time.

Half an hour later there’s loud clattering around coming from the bedroom

“Are you fucking serious?” Ruben says to his book.  Vanessa groans in frustration.

Usnavi’s standing in the middle of his room with no pants on and one arm in the shirt he took off earlier, holding his jeans with a look of confused concentration.

“And where are you planning on going?”

“Gotta go to work,” he says, carefully putting the jeans down on his bedside table and clumsily trying to make his way to the door. He looks utterly out of it.

“I think we had this conversation,” Vanessa says. “You’re staying home today.”

“But…um, gotta go to work?” he says again, less confident. “Pai’s sick too, I said I’d cover his shift so he can stay with Mamá.”

And there it is. Well. it’s hard to be mad at him now, but this isn’t any better.

“ _Fuck_ ,”  Ruben mutters.

“No shift for you today, sweetheart,” she says, keeping her voice steady. “I think you were dreaming.”

Usnavi blinks at her, uncomprehending. “But I told him—“

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay, don’t worry about it, things are under control.”

“Okay,” Usnavi agrees easily, and doesn’t argue when Ruben pushes him back towards the bed, but when Ruben pulls his phone out of his pocket and sits down next to him to start untangling his headphone cable, Usnavi struggles back up looking worried.

“You shouldn’t stay here,” he says. “I don’t want either of you to catch this off me.”

“I feel like if we leave you alone for more than two minutes you’ll somehow end up halfway across the city with no shoes on and no memory of how it happened,” Ruben says.

Usnavi laughs to himself. “Maybe. I’m an inconvenience,” he says, sounding pretty happy about it. “Mamá says she thinks I knew how to teleport as a baby ‘cause I’d always end up in weird places whenever they so much as blinked and they never knew how I got there.”

“Some things never change then,” Ruben says. “Sleep. We’ll sit on this side, the germs won’t reach us here.”

“That doesn’t sound very scientific,” Usnavi says, frowning. He’s blinking slowly now, like he’s having trouble keeping his eyes open.

“Do  _you_  have a PhD?” Vanessa asks. “No? Then you’d better listen up.”

“Mmkay,” Usnavi says, and his eyes stay closed this time.

Ruben looks at her.

“It’s the fever, he gets confused,” she says in a low voice. “This kinda thing happened last year too. It was pretty brutal. He kept talking about needing to check on his mom, and I never knew whether I should remind him. I should’ve warned you. He was sick at the same time as them, did you know? I remember Nina used to take him his homework sometimes, he was off school for like two whole months.”

Ruben shakes his head, and rests a hand gentle on the quilt covering Usnavi’s leg. “It’s not fair,” he says. “It’s so unfair.”

“I know. Can we just…not talk about it, actually? I don’t want him to overhear.”

So they sit in silence. Vanessa left her book in the living room, so she spends a while just observing Usnavi, listening to his mumbling, breathing in the strong menthol Vaporub scent hanging in the air. But after about five minutes the reality of it sets in: turns out watching someone sleep gets pretty boring after a while, no matter how much she loves him, but she doesn’t want to stand up in case she disturbs him.

She fidgets. Ruben offers her one of his earbuds. His podcasts aren’t really Vanessa’s thing, but it’s better than doing nothing, and kind of nice to just listen to some story that she doesn’t understand at all instead of having to be bummed out about Usnavi. God. The flu shouldn’t be this exhausting when she’s not even the one who has it.

***

Vanessa’s not quite asleep but definitely six levels deep in a daydream when Ruben nudges her sharply and takes both of their earbuds out. There’s the sound of someone walking around in the kitchen, the fridge opening.

“Camila,” she mouths, and Ruben relaxes.

There’s a light knock on the bedroom door. Vanessa calls “come in” as quiet as possible but it still wakes Usnavi up. Camila comes in, sets a thermos down on the bedside table, then perches net to him on the edge of the bed and lays a hand on his shoulder.

“Hola, Usnavi, ¿cómo te sientes?”

He squints up at her with his eyes barely open.

“Mamá?” he murmurs. They all wince.

“No, cariño, it’s me,” Camila says.

“Camila brought you soup,”  Vanessa says, as lightly as she can.

Usnavi takes a long moment to process, and Vanessa can see the exact second that understanding hits. She looks away.

“Oh,” he says quietly. ”Right.” Nobody knows what to say, until he sits up and makes a pained sound.

“What hurts?”  Ruben asks immediately.

“Head. Stomach. Chest. Everything,”  Usnavi answers, laying back down, his eyes all scrunched up against the dim light. “I think the drugs wore off. Hey, is that for me?”

Camila nods and passes over the thermos. Usnavi takes it but doesn’t open it, just cups one hand around it and swats irritably at Vanessa’s hand with his free one when she tries to check if his temperature’s gone down.

Ruben checks his watch. ”You can have more Advil after you eat. And if you want more Benadryl or more cough medicine you can pick one, but if you don’t wanna be that fuzzy again I’d recommend alternating instead of both at once.”

“Yeah, that was definitely not the best high,” Usnavi says, then remembers Camila’s in the room and adds “uh, not that I’d know, obviously. I’ll take the Benadryl.”

“I also brought you some orange juice,” Camila says, fluffing unnecessarily at the pillows. “The vitamin C will get rid of your cold faster.”

Ruben twitches next to Vanessa, but manages to suppress his usual “well,  _actually…_ “

“You should try and have some tea, as well. And have you been resting properly? Open the window, keep the room a little cooler, it will help you sleep better. And—“

“Camila,” Usnavi says, exasperated. “It’s loud as hell outside, I’m not opening a window. And I’m twenty five years old, I know how to sleep.”

“ _Ha_ ,” says  Vanessa.

“I have been there for every single one of those twenty-five years, and I know you’d still be up and pretending nothing was wrong if I hadn’t called Vanessa,” Camila retorts. “So just you make sure to stay in bed and do what Ruben and Vanessa tell you. No sneaking off to work like a damn fool.”

“I ain’t  _gonna_ ,”  Usnavi mutters, offended.

“He’s already tried it twice,” Ruben puts in, and  Usnavi rolls onto his side so he can glare at him, balancing the thermos carefully.

“Tattletale,” he says. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that snitches get sti—wait, shit, wrong audience, sorry.”

Camila looks vaguely horrified but Ruben just laughs. “Yeah, old news, you can’t threaten me with that. I’ll absolutely tell on you if I have to.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Camila says.  “Usnavi, you should try and be more like this one, he’s got his head on right.”

Usnavi sticks his tongue out, unimpressed.

“You behave yourself. I’ll leave you in these two sets of capable hands,” she says, kissing the tip of her index finger and then pressing it to Usnavi’s forehead. He smiles up at her, but it looks a little sad around the corners. “Vanessa, Ruben, there’s more of that soup for him in the fridge, and I’ll come back round later with some dinner for all of you.”

“You don’t have t—okay,”  Vanessa says, at Camila’s stern look. “Gracias, Camila. Thanks for looking out for us. As always.”

By the time Camila’s left and Usnavi’s eaten, taken his meds, changed into less sweat-soaked clothes and spent an inordinate amount of time smoothing out every wrinkle in the undersheet so that he can lie down comfortably, he’s starting to space out again.

“You shouldn’t come too close,” he says for the millionth time, as  Vanessa tucks the quilt back around him and presses her hand to his head to check his temperature. No difference, but he looks very slightly less like a corpse.

“Change the record, babe. We’re looking after you and you don’t get a say in it.”

“Okay,” he says, reluctantly. “I could maybe use some looking after.”

“Anyway, we won’t get sick,”  Ruben says. “We have soup and orange juice.”

“Good,”  Usnavi says, yawning. “‘Cause I ain’t got time to babysit you if you do. I’m a busy man. Got a store to run, you know.”

***

Six days later,  Vanessa wakes up sweating and shivery and scratchy-voiced and calls into work, because unlike some people she knows when to take a fucking break. She texts Usnavi with a picture of herself wrapped in her quilt looking like actual hell and captions it  _I_   _hope you’re fucking grateful, you shit._

Usnavi replies with  _sorry, at work, can’t talk,_ and then an hour later appears in her bedroom with a thermos and what looks like the entire pharmaceutical section of the bodega. He still looks run down, but the fever lifted late on Sunday night, so he’s doing better even though he insisted on going back to work as soon as possible.

“I’m here with supplies!” he says. “I asked Ruben and he said Tylenol or Advil are best for fever, but I bought like everything just in case. And this isn’t Camila’s soup, sorry, I ate all that so you’ll have to make do with mine, and I got you like three boxes of tissues so you don’t run out, and  Ruben’s coming over as soon as he’s done at college, and—“

“So  _now_  you’ll close the store in the middle of the day?” she says, before he runs through an entire list, thought it’s not actually the first time he’s done this for her. He’s always a little  _too_  attentive when anyone’s sick, which would make her sad if she let herself think about it too hard, but she can’t deny it’s much nicer than when she used to just deal with the flu alone. “Are you still feverish, or did you just taste freedom and now it’s gone to your head?”

He shrugs, dropping the bag on the floor beside him, takes off his shoes and his jeans and crawls into bed beside her.

“I’ve got my priorities right,” he says.


	10. spicy noodle

“I dunno what flavor,” Usnavi says, frowning at the packet of noodles. “It’s all in Korean. I’m guessing from the lil flame logo they’re probably spicy? Sonny just said I’d like ‘em, and I don’t have anything else in.”

“I’ll pass,” Vanessa says. “I’m not hungry for mystery noodles, I’ll wait till Ruben gets back and order takeout.”

“Aite, more for me,” says Usnavi, dumping the packet out into the pan of water. Vanessa kisses him on the cheek and heads back into the living room.

Approximately six minutes later her quiet reading time is interrupted by a full on  _shriek_  from the kitchen. Vanessa’s not sure what she expects to find when she runs in there, but Usnavi with his head directly under the faucet, flapping his hands around wildly and making some fascinatingly garbled unhappy noises probably isn’t the worst case scenario, even if he does look somewhat in danger of drowning.

“Jesus, Usnavi,” she says, annoyed and relieved. “From the sound of it I thought you were being murdered.”

“I  _have_  been murdered!” he wails, pointing accusingly at the innocuous-looking bowl on the table then sticking his head back under the faucet.

“…So they’re definitely spicy, then?” Vanessa asks.

Usnavi emerges from the running water long enough to say “nnyyeeergh”, and then slaps the counter very hard just to emphasise the point. Vanessa passes him the milk. Usnavi takes it and chugs half of it directly from the carton. Some of it escapes down his chin. He’s so gross, why does she like him so goddamn much?

“Your face is the same color as your shirt,” she tells him, in case he wasn’t aware. From the glare he directs at her, he probably already knew. She smiles back at him, angelic.

Usnavi collapses into his chair. The milk seems to have helped, though he still keeps sticking his tongue out and frantically licking at the back of his hand like he’s trying to scrub the taste out.

“I’ve been betrayed,” he whines, wiping his eyes on the hem of his tshirt. “Call Sonny and tell him I’m going to haunt him forever after this kills me. Tell Sonny I am going to come for him and drag him with me to hell, which is where I am right now, because of his _terrible homicide noodles_.”

Vanessa’s curiosity is piqued. She reaches for the bowl: Usnavi shouts “no!” and knocks her arm away.

“They can’t be  _that_  bad.”

“Ha!” says Usnavi, shrilly. “ _Ha_!” and then he gestures at himself with wild eyes as if to say,  _here’s your evidence._ He’s literally sweating.

“Since when are Latin people scared of heat?” Vanessa teases, in her best Dani impression.

“This is  _not latin!_  Latin is like…actual taste with some hot, this is straight up volcano with a detour past Korea flavor and I  _died_ , Vanessa, my tongue melted off and then I died and you’ll be dead too if you eat it.”

“You’re so melodramatic. Your Dominican ass just ain’t used to it. You coulda cleaned floors with my Abuela’s pique criollo _,_ that woman was a menace with a chili pepper.”

Usnavi narrows his reddened eyes at her. “Fine. Go on, then, if you’re so sure. I fuckin’ dare you.”

She narrows her eyes right back. “I don’t have to prove myself to you.”

“Nope, not at all, if you don’t want to,” he says, and gives her an evil grin. His mouth is very pink, like he’s been burned. They stay locked-eyes for a minute, and then Vanessa grabs the bowl.

***

“…What the fuck happened to you guys?” says Ruben when he gets home.

“Usnavi tried to destroy me with noodles,” Vanessa says, with her head against the table. She has the hiccups. “Every time I -  _hic_  - shit! Every time  _that_  happens its like eating a Fourth of July display.  _Hic_. Aaaagh!”

“I told you,” Usnavi says. He’s sitting on the floor beside the open fridge with his head inside it, as though that will help. “I  _told_  you.”

“ _Hic_ fu-uuuck me,” Vanessa says. “I don’t know what hurts more, the noodles or the fact that you were right, which one am I meant to be mad at?”

“Split the difference and blame Sonny?” Usnavi suggests.

Vanessa points approvingly at him without lifting her head. “Yes. Love it. I will end him.”

“These noodles?” Ruben asks, picking up the bowl. He holds it up and tilts it so he can observe the contents from various angles, looking about half a second away from going to get his labcoat and a pair of protective goggles, and then he scoops a fairly generous portion onto the fork. Vanessa lifts her head to watch.

“I wouldn’t,” Usnavi warns him.  “There’s nothing to save you if you do, we’re out of milk.”

“Is that because you poured it all over yourself? You’ve got—“ Ruben gestures in a little circle all around Usnavi’s face. “Just everywhere, really. And I’m sure they’re not that bad.”

Vanessa laughs, hysterically.

Usnavi wipes futilely at his face and says “your funeral.”

“Wouldn’t be my first,” Ruben says, and takes a mouthful. He chews thoughtfully. Seconds pass. “Oh, wow, fair enough, I can see your point.”

“…That’s  _it_?” Vanessa says. “That’s your reaction?”

“They’re definitely pretty hot,” Ruben says, but nothing on his face betrays the painful truth of that statement apart from a very faint flush.

“Wh- but- no,” she says, uncomprehending, and looks at Usnavi for assistance. Usnavi gets to his feet and examines the bowl of noodles very closely as if he’s expecting them to have been exchanged like a shitty magic trick. Then he squints at Ruben’s face. Ruben blinks mildly at him and takes a second bite.

“What  _are_  you?!” Usnavi whispers.


	11. warmer winter weather

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **prompt: Usnavi wears one of Ruben's sweaters because it's warm and comforting.**

 

Winter officially begins on December 21st, apparently. He looked it up.

That’s  _clearly_  bullshit. Winter starts…well, there’s lots of places Usnavi could argue winter starts. After Halloween, since Halloween is obviously peak Fall and everything after that is just waiting around on Thanksgiving. After Thanksgiving. If it didn’t feel like affording far too much power to Starbucks he’d say it’s when certain customers stop talking his fuckin’ ear off about why doesn’t he do pumpkin spice lattes - he’ll serve coffee a lot of ways to people’s different and sometimes incredibly odd tastes but he has standards - and start talking about  _war on Christmas non-denominational winter cups it’s an outrage and we’re boycotting until they fix it_ , to which he always shrugs and smiles and makes a perfect coffee, and hands it over with a cheerful “happy holidays!”. Maybe just once pumpkins stop being such a thing in general. They don’t even taste good. He doesn’t get it.

Winter starts December 1st, sat between two gravestones. Winter starts whenever he gets his first cough during cold-and-flu-season and spends the day distracting himself with frantic, obsessive store maintenance while Sonny or Vanessa or Camila tell him he really should slow down when he’s sick (he never slows down because he’s never sick, no matter what his body might try and insist. Being sick has historically not ended well so he’s just refusing to do it again -  _look_ , Usnavi never claimed to be rational). Winter starts whenever someone else gets their first cough of the season and he forces soup and cough medicine and bed rest at them while they complain about him being too fussy and over-attentive, but they never complain too harshly.

Winter, maybe, starts today, when Usnavi wakes up in the middle of the night and his fingers are numb with cold. November’s first major battleground: Usnavi De la Vega versus the cost of heating an apartment.

Hey, but maybe it’ll be cheaper this year. Unexpected bonus of dating Vanessa: his bills have definitely seen the benefit of someone to share body heat with him the last two winters. Now there’s three of them, even better. Who even needs a radiator?

Except that they don’t share a bed every night, because apparently he’s dating two people who like “personal space” or “time to themselves” or other such alien concepts, and they’re not sharing a bed tonight, and Usnavi is cold. He ducks under the duvet and blows on his fingers till the feeling comes back to them, but he can’t do that all night.

Winter is sitting out on a fire escape in December chainsmoking cigarettes, all the hairs on the back of his neck standing up in the chill. All the hairs on the back of his neck are standing up right now. Winter is—

is this bedroom. They couldn’t always afford to turn on the heat, so as a kid he sometimes used to sleep in here with his parents. As a teenager when that felt too weird, he got all the hot water bottle privileges, bundling several of them up in the sheets with him in his tiny not-a-bedroom cupboard-bedroom. His parents had each other to help preserve their warmth. Winter is sitting by their bedside: they’re warm now, too warm, and Usnavi is freezing with his hands like ice against their burning foreheads but he holds out as long as possible every night. Every night he has to give in and sleep, still tired from his own only-just-passed illness, despite telling himself he can’t go to bed until the fever breaks.

The fever never breaks. Winter is opening the door to this room in the morning on the first day of December and— fuck this, no, don’t do this. It’s 2017, Usnavi has got work tomorrow, it’s mid-November and he’s not spending the next two and a half weeks building up to that anniversary, it’s bad enough on the day itself without stretching it out.

Try a new track: Usnavi is cold. Solve the problem, go back to sleep, get on with life. Still wrapped in the duvet, he rolls himself out of bed to land on the floor loudly in an awkward crouch, trying to poke around in his drawers for some warm clothes while exposing as little bare skin to the bitter air as possible.

Second battle of November: Usnavi fucking hates having to sleep in a sweater. Or having to wear a sweater in general. No big tragic reason for this one: he just happens to prefer not wearing clothes. Naked is more fun and, more to the point, clothes are so  _uncomfortable_ , which is one of two factors that dictate his whole fashion sense: big, old jeans don’t scratch unpleasantly at the backs of his legs when he bends his knees like new, stiff, well-fitting ones do. Big shirts don’t rub constantly against his skin and make him itchy.

Sleeping in sweaters also just does not work when you’re a fidgety sleeper. The sleeves get all rucked up when he rolls over and the body bit gets all twisted and sometimes he wakes up feeling like he’s being held hostage by his own clothes. But he’s got a twenty-five year streak of not losing appendages to frostbite that he’d like to keep rolling, so sacrifices must be made as the weather demands them.

His fingers, still cold but not quite numb, rustle through the drawers finding and discarding several options through touch rather than sight. That one’s too itchy, that one the neckline is too restrictive, that one was in the load of laundry he forgot about for a day so it still smells like damp. That one is — not Usnavi’s sweater.

He pulls it out. It’s one of Ruben’s. he must have left it here and it got mixed in with Usnavi’s haphazard attempts at tidying up - he’s so much better at keeping the store tidy than his own living space, for reasons that continue to escape him. Or maybe the sweaters are just multiplying of their own accord by now, Ruben seems to have so many. It’s big and soft and Usnavi can’t really see the color but it’s not one of the ridiculously patterned ones so he knows it’s in one of several nearly-identical shades of a dark, rich blue, so that now whenever Usnavi sees anything close to that color it always makes him think of Ruben.

Running his fingers over the cuffs he feels where the material is worn and fraying and it makes him smile - Ruben, like Usnavi, has a habit of absent-mindedly chewing on his sleeves, sometimes to the point of making little holes for his thumbs to poke through. Ruben, like Usnavi, likes his clothes comfortable rather than stylish. Ruben, unlike Usnavi, hates summer a thousand times more than winter, hates the constant choices between overheating and overexposing, the bright sun and hot days. Unlike Usnavi, Ruben doesn’t like wandering around in a permanent state of semi-undressed: he likes his layers of soft, protective armor.

That’s something Usnavi knows but will never quite  _get_  about him. They’re too different in that way.

Or maybe if he thinks about it more sideways he kind of does understand it: there’s things like the chill of seasons turning that’s harsh in more than just a meteorological sense that makes him seek out heat the way Ruben seeks out privacy, and he’s cold, and he hates the cold for too many reasons so he pulls the sweater on. It’s old and well-worn but still clearly higher quality material than the cheap shit Usnavi buys or had handed down from larger friends who didn’t stop growing at age 16 and who insist on continuing to do things like getting built as fuck (three-quarters of Usnavi’s wardrobe used to belong to Benny, he thinks). Ruben’s sweater is too big as well, long in the sleeves and loose. It smells mostly just like clean laundry, and not the kind that sat in the machine for seven hours before someone remembered to put it in the dryer.

Usnavi gets back into bed, duvet right over his head, pulls his sleeves all the way down over his chilled fingers and pulls the neckline up over his nose and mouth so he can breathe recirculating warmth around himself like a fortress to hold against the onslaught of imminent December, and he doesn’t wake up cold in the morning.


	12. roads

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **[re: every ot3 smutfic i ever write]**

Vanessa raises her eyebrows suggestively. Usnavi checks his watch. “Aw, man, I would love to have sex, but I really need a full eight hours sleep tonight. I was wiped out at the store all day today.”

“Usnavi, it’s only six thirty in the evening,” says Vanessa, then she thinks back to last night and okay, maybe Usnavi has a point. “Okay, but you do realize if we just skipped all that extra stuff we’d probably not have to schedule in so rigidly?”

“The extra stuff? What, like the bit where we all stare at each other in quiet, elated disbelief that we’re lucky enough to have not one but two very gorgeous naked people in front of us? But I love that bit!” protests Ruben.

“Or did you mean the parts where we take a break from the wild stuff to do cute things like kiss each others knuckles or gently brush someone’s hair out of their eyes while contemplating all the winding roads in our lives that led us to this beautiful point of convergence?” asks Usnavi. “Because I gotta contemplate the roads, babe. I’m not even sure I can come without contemplating the roads any more, to be honest.”

“And if you think i’m gonna skip the bit where both of you sandwich me in the middle and softly remind me all the reasons why you want me there while promising to keep me safe from all the shitty backstory demons i’ve got then you’re wrong,” says Ruben. “I’ve got used to it now. You’ve created a monster. Validate me while we’re all naked, Vanessa, you know it makes me hot.”

“I suppose I would miss the thing where you two make out shirtless and I watch sort of half-affectionately and half-lecherously,” Vanessa concedes. “It’s just it does take a lot of time.”

Usnavi checks his watch again and sighs. “Oh, fuck it. Who needs sleep anyway? Come on then. Ruben, shirt off. Vanessa, prepare for a show.”


	13. baby stories

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Anonymous:  
> Can we get some baby stories of the trio?]

Ruben when he has just learned to walk and just started sleeping in his first real little-kid sized bed instead of a crib is enthralled by this new freedom to roam and immediately starts making the most of it. He climbs out of bed carefully at six am, toddles out of his bedroom and makes his stumbling baby-step way to the kitchen. He is a boy on a mission.   
  
A little while later his mom comes in to get a glass of water and finds Ruben sitting in what looks like a small mountain of breakfast cereal with one of his plastic bowls by his side, shaking out the empty box apparently to make sure he really got it all.

“I make it,” Ruben says when he sees her come in, pointing around himself in case she didn’t notice.“Para mamá. Desayuno, I make it.”

He claps his hands a few times, then frowns expectantly at her when she doesn’t respond immediately and does it again. It’s early so it takes her a minute to he figure out what he wants, but he nods with satisfaction once she gives an exaggerated gasp of joy and applauds him.

“Para mamá,” he repeats, in his quiet deliberate way like he’s imparting a great and secret wisdom to her. He stands up (the cereals crunch around his feet) and holds the bowl out to her. “Desayuno.”

“Gracias, mi querido, that was very kind of you,” she says. From the entire box, he got three cornflakes actually in the bowl. She eats them and makes appreciative yum-noises while Ruben watches her keenly, and thanks god he didn’t manage to find the milk.

***

Vanessa’s mom winds down every Sunday with as long a shower as a single parent can ever manage to get and a comfortable bathrobe and a cheap face mask. Vanessa always eyes her with curious concern once the face mask goes on.

“Only me, kiddo,” her mom says, picking Vanessa up off the floor.

“Sun? Sun? For walk?” Vanessa asks, confused, patting at the white cream then scrunching her hand up with a disgusted face at the greasy texture.

“What?” her mom says. Babies are hard to interpret. “Oh, like when we do sunscreen? No, V, this is for nighttime. It helps Mommy feel less tired. And it makes my skin look pretty.”

“Pretty,” Vanessa repeats, serious and thoughtful.

A couple days later Vanessa’s sitting in her baby chair with her dinner while her mom cooks for herself. In the thirty seconds it takes her mom to fill a pan with water and put it over the heat, Vanessa manages to spread nearly the entire bowlful of mashed banana over her face.

“… _Why_ ,” her mom asks, resignedly.

“Pretty,” Vanessa answers. “Pretty!”

Ah. Learning by example. Can’t argue with that. “Yes, you look  _very_  pretty. Runway ready. Is that…yep, that’s banana up your nose, I hear that’s what they’re all wearing in Paris this season.”

Vanessa smashes her fists into the leftover banana and makes a happy, burbling noise, then rubs her hands in her hair.

***

Usnavi’s parents have a closet with a full length mirror for a door. It’s been there since they moved here, when Usnavi was still just a pregnancy bump.

He notices it properly for the first time at fourteen months old and  _shrieks_.

“¡Bebebebé!” he says, pointing excitedly and slapping his other hand against his mama’s shoulder to get her attention. “¡Bebé es bebé es bebé!”

“¡Es cierto!” she answers, “Bebé  _Usnavi_!”

She places him on the floor in front of the mirror, kneels behind him to watch him stare wide-eyed at his own reflection. He presses both of his hands against the mirror and makes a shocked sound when this mysterious new baby in front of him does the same.

“Eres tú, it’s Usnavi,” his mamá says, but he’s probably too young to get the concept of reflections so she rolls with it and tells him, “say hello.”

“Bebebé,” Usnavi says, then leans forward and presses his mouth wetly to the mirror, leaving a damp imprint behind when he sits back. “Hello kissa bebé, kiss baby.”

“That’s right,” she says. “Kiss the baby.”

“Kissa baby,” he repeats, and does it again, shrieking again and drumming his little feet into the ground afterwards. His delight is extremely contagious, so his mom keeps encouraging him and he keeps doing it until she’s breathless with laughter and realises they’re now long past the time she told Camila they’d be visiting.

“Oh! Time to say bye-bye to the baby, Usnavi,” she says.

“Bye-bye-bye-bye,” he babbles, but when she picks him up and walks out of sightline of the closet door, he makes an anguished noise and yells “no!”

“Mi pequeño, we have to go now.”

“Kissa  _baby_ ,” he wails, sounding heartbroken. “Kiss bebebé!”

She sets him back down. The tears immediately stop when he’s back in front of the mirror with his newfound reflection friend. Usnavi lets out a long warble of joy and drums his feet again.

“Just one more minute, then,” she says, but she knows that she’s already lost this battle, and picks up the phone to tell Camila she’ll have to come to them instead.


	14. cake time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Anonymous:  
> Continuing the baking questions: what are each of the trios favourite things that Ruben has made?]

Vanessa comes in from work to Ruben all flour dusted, crouched in front of the oven and squinting into it.

“Oooh,” she says, happily. “Cake time? I love it when I come home at cake time.”

“Quesito time,” Ruben says. “Hopefully. I haven’t made pastry from scratch in a while so they might actually just be disasters.”

“Couldn’t you just use ready-roll pastry? And did you know you have cream cheese in your bangs?”

“Elena would return from the grave just to thwap me round the head if I used ready-roll,” Ruben says, trying to peer upwards into his own hair. Vanessa could just get it for him but she’s enjoying the way he’s gone slightly crosseyed so she leaves him to figure it out for himself.

“Who’s Elena?” she asks.

“She lived down the road from us back in Vega Alta. And my mom grew up right next door to her.” Ruben tugs at the splotch of cream cheese in his hair and makes a face as he wipes his hand on his shirt, then sits down properly on the floor to stretch his legs out in front of him. “Ugh, too old to crouch. Elena didn’t believe in writing recipes down, and her daughter didn’t really care about baking, so she taught all that stuff to Ma so that it didn’t get forgotten. Learn it by heart and pass it on, that was her philosophy.”

“Dani and Abuela Claudia and Usnavi’s mom all taught me how to cook,” Vanessa says. “Never really got far with baking though. Did Elena teach you too?”

“Some from her, some was Ma, some my abuela. But I don’t remember a lot about Elena, she died when I was seven. We used to go back home a couple times a year after we moved to Philadelphia and always saw her while she was still around, though, so I always think about her whenever I go back to Puerto Rico. Which I haven’t for a while.”

“Do you miss it?”  
  
“Sometimes. But I’m pretty happy with the home I’ve got going on right now, and anyway I’ve not been much for travelling these past couple years.”

“I’ve never been to PR,” Vanessa says. She gets kinda sad about that sometimes, when Nina gets all passionate and informed about cultural heritage or when Usnavi gets misty-eyed about the Dominican Republic, sad that she doesn’t even know what her own island looks like outside of photos. She likes hearing Ruben talk about his memories of it though. It makes it feel closer, somehow.

“You haven’t?”

“We weren’t exactly a happy vacation memories kinda family, babe,” she reminds him. “Or a baking family either, I guess. I can open a beer bottle with my teeth, that’s about the only skill I got passed down.”

Ruben gives her one of his sad, thoughtful looks, then smiles at her. “You wanna learn how to make pastry? I got enough ingredients left for a second batch, and I’m a pretty good teacher.”

“…Sure,” she says, holds her hand out to help him stand. “Why the hell not? Let’s make these quesitos our bitches.”

***

Usnavi wakes up at about ten past midnight, checks the time on his phone and notes that it’s July 5th with a sweet, sad ache. Vanessa is in her usual near-coma deep sleep on his left. The other side of the bed is empty. Usnavi goes to investigate. Not like he’s getting back to sleep any time soon.

There’s baking basics placed neatly on the counter, eggs and flour and butter, and Ruben is sitting there in line with them wearing a thoughtful frown and a pair of blue ear defenders, scrolling through his phone. Usnavi makes sure to walk round to Ruben’s front slowly and waves to get his attention, as unstartlingly as possible. Ruben still jumps, but rallies quickly and smiles, pulling the ear defenders off and letting them hang around his neck.

“It’s late for baking,” Usnavi says, even though this definitely isn’t the latest he’s found Ruben in the kitchen.

“Fireworks got me kinda rattled,” Ruben explains, then taps the ear defenders with his fingernail so the plastic makes a bright clicking sound. “And I definitely can’t sleep with these on, so I figured I might as well do something fun.”

“Whatcha makin’?” Usnavi asks.

“Not decided yet, just looking through some recipes for inspiration. Hey, what’s your favorite kind of cake?”

“Dude, you can’t just ask me a question like that, that’s like asking who’s my favorite out of you and Vanessa. Why just choose one?”

“Because I can’t make every kind of cake in one night?”

“Excuses, excuses.” Usnavi thinks for a minute. “I don’t know about an all-time favorite but me and Abuela used to make mango cake a lot when I stayed over at hers. Or, well, Abuela used to make it, I’d just eat leftover cake batter. Baking ain’t my strong suit, s’why Nina got dibs on all of Abuela’s recipe cards when we were clearing out her stuff after she passed.”

Ruben keeps tapping away on his phone but he glances up at Usnavi. “That’s today, right? Is that why you’re awake?”

“Yeah, but it’s okay,” Usnavi says. “It wasn’t a bad day yesterday. I always feel like she’s watching the fireworks with me. It’s different than with my folks. Easier to celebrate who she was instead of just missing her.”

“But you do still miss her.”

“Every day.”

Ruben nods, then his eyebrows jump at something on his phone and he smiles. “Nina Rosario quick off the draw as always,” he says. “She’s got them all scanned and saved to her laptop, apparently. I appreciate a woman with a proper filing system.”

“All what saved?”

“Recipe cards. You wanna make a mango cake? We can do something else if it’ll be too much of a memory.”

“No, I’d like that. It’s a good memory,” Usnavi says. “And I think it would make Abuela happy if we did. Can I lick the spoon when we’re done?”

“Of course.”


	15. window

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [prompt: ruben and usnavi, “who crawls through someone’s window at 4am to go for ice cream?!”

“Do I look like Clarissa Explains It All to you?” Usnavi demands as Ruben pretty much falls in through the window he just opened.

“Don’t  _you_  wish,” Ruben says, straightening up and readjusting his clothes.

“What I’m asking is why are you coming in through my window?”

“I wasn’t sure if you’d gone back to sleep, I didn’t want to press the buzzer and wake you up.”

“You’re a certified genius so I’m gonna let you figure out for yourself why that’s a wild thing that you just said to me.”

Ruben percolates on that for a moment, then goes “ohhhh, yeah”. His hair is sticking up so he resembles some kinda Puerto Rican cockatiel. It bounces as he nods.

“Are you okay? You look, uh,” Usnavi waves his hands around, “you just definitely look a way.”

“I’ve been awake for forty-seven hours,” Ruben answers cheerfully.

“ _Jesus_ , Ruben, why?!”

“So, I told you how I’ve been thinking about whether Blackout could be moderated so that a smaller dose could function as a general anti-anxiety rather than a full blown sedative, right?”

“Yeah?”

“It’d be perfect for it because the risk of dependency is so low, but the problem I’ve been running up against is—“ and whatever the problem is Usnavi has no idea because the explanation from there on pretty much sounds like someone trying to forcibly shove a neurology textbook into his ear, and Usnavi’s understanding of the human brain begins and ends at “it lives in my skull and it’s always a real coin toss as to whether it’s gonna work properly”. He nods along and tries to keep up anyway, because Ruben looks very excited and it’s cute when he wiggles his fingers around for emphasis like scientist jazz hands.

“—and once I figured  _that_ part out it’s obviously no trouble at all to see how I could modify a delivery system similar to, say, an extended-release stimulant in a way that will potentiate the dosage in a cost-effective way!” Ruben finishes, and lifts both arms in the air like  _yaaaay_!

“So you solved it then,” Usnavi says, just to be sure he got the right end of the stick.

“I solved the hell out of it!”

“That’s so awesome!” Usnavi says, rewards him with a kiss. “ _You’re_  so awesome!”

Ruben bounces up on the balls of his feet and says, “so what are we doing now?”

“Now we are going to bed,” Usnavi says. “Since, y’know, you’ve been awake for nearly two days and all.”

“Aw,” Ruben murmurs, shoulders dropping disappointedly. “But you said we’d celebrate?”

“…When?

“You texted me back,” Ruben says. “That’s why I came over.”

And true, Usnavi has vague memories of a text alert and he woke up with his phone in his hand so maybe he was sleep messaging. He checks.

**ruben** :  
\- ¡¡¡MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH!!! I FUCKING NAILED IT HOLY SHIT CAN I COME OVER AND THROW A PARTY OR SOMETHING THIS IS FANTASTIC

**usnavi:**  
- afmklwe

**ruben:  
** \- GREAT I’LL BE THERE IN TEN

“I think I just fell asleep on my phone, to be honest,” Usnavi says, showing it to Ruben.

“Oh,” Ruben says. “Well, it seemed like a yes at the time, I’m pretty sleep deprived. Shit, I’m sorry, we can talk tomorrow, I’ll just—“

He makes like he’s about to climb back out the window. Ruben Marcado: unfathomably clever, still forgets that Usnavi has a functioning door in his apartment. Besides which Usnavi knows enough about how Blackout came about to know that Ruben’s probably never so much celebrated any progress on it as he’s been told it’s not  _enough_  progress and that he has to do better, so no way is Usnavi gonna piss on his parade for this. He grabs Ruben’s arm and says “fuck  _no_ , we’re celebrating. But I ain’t breaking out any champagne at this time of night, so what do you wanna do instead?”

Ruben shrugs. “We could…go for ice cream?

“Why the hell not, at 4am?” Usnavi says. “Bueno. Tonight I’ll get you ice cream, and  _tomorrow_  I will get you a key to my place so you can just let yourself in instead of scaling the fire escape because my dude, the heart attacks I had waking up to a shadowy figure knocking on my window, and somehow I feel like you’re not gonna share it around and do the same to Vanessa next time.”

“That’s ‘cause she’s smart enough to live downtown. This is the price you pay for living a few buildings away from me,” Ruben says, stifling a yawn.

“Well, when you put it that way I guess I do only have myself to blame,” Usnavi says. “Come on, Dr Breakthrough, let me find some pants and then we’ll get our party on before you pass out.”


	16. pants

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [prompt: ruben and usnavi, “what the hell are you wearing?”

“They’re just jeans,” Usnavi says. 

“Barely,” Ruben disagrees. “Holy crap, is this a really early midlife crisis or a very late teenage experimental phase? Because we’ve all been there, but there’s a line. You cannot wear those in public.”

“Why not?”

“They’re  _obscene!_  I’m pretty sure you’d be committing a felony. What if children saw you?!”

“They ain’t that bad?” Usnavi says, uncertain. 

“Usnavi, I walked into the room and literally the first thing I thought was  _oh, he’s_ ** _definitely_** _not wearing underwear_. _”_

“My boxers wouldn’t fit in the legs properly,” Usnavi mutters sheepishly. He attempts to pull the crotch of his pants down from where they’re digging in at the tops of his thighs, but there’s not exactly ample room for adjustment. He’s pretty sure he hears something rip. 

“Shouldn’t that tell you something? Why are you even wearing them? You hate tight clothes.”

“Well.I had to go out and get some new tank tops ‘cause all of mine are beyond saving,” Usnavi says. “And while I was there I was thinkin’, so Nina was sending me some old pictures from high school the other day? And we were laughin’ over Vanessa’s really awful bangs and Nina’s double-denim phase and then I realised, I’m still wearin’ the exact same thing I was a decade ago. And like, that can’t be fashion? And maybe I should try something new, so I don’t get boring and predictable?”

“What? No! Never try anything new,” Ruben says. “Usnavi, we know this,  _never try new things._ Especially not clothes, we’re lost in the woods out there. _”_

“Obviously, that’s why I messaged Vanessa askin’ for advice before I did anything, and she said ‘maybe some jeans that aren’t three sizes too big’.”

“Right, and you thought you’d overcorrect and go three sizes too small instead? I can practically see the shape of your leg hairs through the fabric.”

“You don’t understand,” Usnavi says urgently. “I always buy the same kind, I have no idea what I’m doing outside of that, it was terrifying. I was starting to think maybe I was gonna die right there in the denim section. Then some teenage kid who works there comes up and asks if I need help, but when I said yes she gave me all these suggestions and it was  _way_   _too many pants_ so when she asked if I wanted to try any of them on I panicked and grabbed a random pair off her and said ‘it’s fine, I’m in a rush, I’ll take these’. I just wanted to go  _home_!”

“You made the right choice,” Ruben says, patting Usnavi’s shoulder consolingly. “The only option in situations like that is to run away.”

“Figured since I’d already bought them I might as well see if I was into them. I’ve been testing them out this morning. I guess thank god I didn’t wear them on a work day, huh? Are they really that revealing?”

“You’d have to write yourself up for dress code violation,” Ruben says. “So what’s the verdict, are you making the switch to skinny jeans permanently?”

Usnavi wiggles uncomfortably. “I dunno, I don't think so. You ever had a friction burn on your taint?”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”


	17. pinniped

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [for two separate anon prompts asking for ruben hanging out with seals, two separate aquarium trips for 1994 and 2018 ruben. totally didn't upload this with a glaring error earlier what haha]

**1994.**

Ruben’s favorite place, other than the house they used to live in back in Vega Alta, is the aquarium. True, it’s the first and only time in his six short years of life he’s ever been to one, but he already knows it.

He goes with Mamá. Just the two of them, the way he prefers things to be. Ruben knows so many things he really wants to share but he’s only very  _small_ , you see, he’s got more information than he can keep track of in his tiny little self so sometimes he forgets and repeats the same things three or five or ten times in one conversation. Which doesn’t seem like a problem to him, since he never gets bored of knowing them, but it must be a problem because Dad gets sick of hearing them. Dad gets sick of hearing Ruben in general, most days, unless he’s mad at Ruben for not talking at all, so Ruben never seems to get it right one way or another.

Mamá never gets mad at him for talking the wrong amount or repeating himself, even if sometimes she looks kind of frazzled by it. She never shouts at him or tells him to stop making a scene, either. So maybe the fact it’s gonna be a whole day just the two of them has got a lot to do with why Ruben’s instantly feeling good about the aquarium. And there’s all the lovely colors and water sounds and a place where you can put your hands in some water and touch an actual starfish, so it’s kinda like when they’d go to the beach back home and also kinda like the sensory room which he likes best out of all the things he does at therapy.

And the  _creatures._ There’s all kinds of colorful fish, but then there’s also things like turtles and seahorses and jellyfish, which as he tells everyone isn’t technically a fish.

“Fish, phylum chordata. Jellyfish, cnidaria, same as anemones and corals. No brains or spines,“ Ruben explains to the small group of people around him, a few parents and six or seven kids and the aquarium guide who Ruben's accidentally-on-purpose taken over for.

A boy a couple years older than Ruben raises his hand.

“Yes?” Ruben asks, pointing at him.

“A kid at my school says if a jellyfish stings you, you gotta pee on the sting so it stops hurting, is that real?”

One or two kids giggle.

“No,” Ruben says. “Not real. Then you still got a sting  _and_  you’ll smell like pee.”

The kids all  _holler_  with laughter, and a few of the parents chuckle too. Ruben covers his ears until the noise stops, but he’s not upset by it like he usually would be: they were all interested in what he said. His words all came out clearly in mostly-sentences. He made everyone laugh, on purpose. This might be the best day of his entire life.

The guide raises his eyebrows at Ruben’s mamá while the rest of the visitors disperse around the room to look into various tanks and point at various creatures. “He’s a smart little dude, isn’t he?” he says.

Mamá smiles brightly and says “he certainly is.”

Ruben nearly explodes with pride. He jumps down from the low step surrounding the tanks to tug on Mamá’s hand, making his little wiggly gesture that means he wants his tangle, which one of his doctors said is good for helping him stay calm. Ruben’s good at talking about animals and planets and inventions and chemicals. He’s not so good at talking any other way, in either of his languages, even sometimes for really easy stuff, and he’s suddenly so too-full of happiness that it’s made him forget all his words again. That’s okay for now. He’ll have to try and remember before they get home but Mamá never yells at him and they’ve got all day.

“Do you need to go outside for a little while?” she asks, handing the toy over. They had to take it apart and restructure it because when they first got it the colors were in random sequence and Ruben hated looking at it, it made no sense. Now the colors are all evenly spaced it’s much better. He keeps the tangle winding between his chubby little fingers and shakes his head as hard as he can.

“Just getting a bit excited?” she asks and he nods. “Well, I’m glad you’re having fun, cariño.”

Ruben nods again. He finds a little metal ridge between where the carpeted central walkway meets the tiles down the side, and tightrope-walks across it all the way around the corner. He’s concentrating so hard on his feet and his tangle that he almost walks directly into the tank in front of him, before Mamá puts a hand in front of him to stop him in his tracks.

“Mind how you go,” she says.

Ruben ignores her, staring at the blueish-green water in front of him. It’s a  _huge_  tank. There’s stairs up to a balcony-thing around the side to go look in from the top, but there’s a few families standing around the balconies so he decides they should probably stay here where it’s quieter for the moment. He stands very close to the glass, waiting, and then something very large and dark drifts slowly right in front of his eyes.

Ruben shrieks, and falls over.

Mamá instantly goes into worry-mode, putting her hands on his shoulders and saying, “okay, Rubén, remember what we practiced, nice and calm. Uno, dos, tres, respira. Rubén, pay attention to me, uno, dos—”

“Mamá,” Ruben says impatiently, trying to shrug her hands off. He loves his mamá but it’s so annoying that she assumes he’s about to have a meltdown every time he has a loud feeling. The only problem he’s got right now is that she’s blocking his view. “Seal!”

“Yes, cariño,” she says, not moving or letting go of his shoulders. “Did it scare you?”

_“No,”_  he says. “I wanna  _see.”_

She looks him over, then decides he’s okay and lets him go look in the tank while she leans over to read the little information board . There’s five seals in there, floating around lazily: another one drifts close by the window near them and Ruben shrieks again, overjoyed.

“These are Pacific harbor seals,” she says. “They can be found all along the Pacific coastline. These ones are from Mexico.”

“Mexico,” Ruben murmurs, makes the connections: Mexico, means Latino, means they didn't come from Philadelphia either, they must have moved here too. “Far away. Like me?”

“Very much like you, yes.”

He claps, and jumps up and down three times, which is enough to show he’s happy but not so much that it’s annoying. Then he remembers Dad isn’t here, so he lets himself jump a few more times and puts his face back against the window. The seal comes up and bumps its face up against his through the glass, like it’s kissing him.

Ruben giggles and says a quiet “¡hola!” to his new friend, and because he’s polite he adds, “mi llamo es Ruben”. His doctor said to Mamá it might be be better for Ruben’s speaking level and his social skills at school if they were stricter about Spanish being a _secondary_ language and for hometime only, but Ruben knows from experience it can be scary being new to a country so he wants to help the seal feel more at home.

“Do you like the seals, Rubén?”

Ruben nods. “My favorite,” he says, having just decided beyond any question that this is true.

“What is it you like about them?”

He doesn’t know. He’s only just found out they’re the best thing ever. He could tell her all the facts he knows about them: that only the ones without ears are true seals, or that when seals sleep in water they float upright with just their noses poking out so they can breathe. Or he could tell her that he never knew until he got so close up how they’re so silly and wise-looking, with their bellies and their sad eyes.

But Ruben’s only six years old. He’s never seen one in real life before and his tiny little self is thoroughly overwhelmed with how intensely he loves them, so all he says in a reverent whisper is “ _round_ ”.

His mom laughs so hard she has to sit down.

***

**2018.**

“Friday time, fun time, ladies gents and folks, we got  _Rrrrruben_  riding the airwaves today, bringing us hot deets and fresh beats from the weekend streets, that’s Ruben Manuel Marcado on-the- _mic_ ,” Usnavi says in his radio voice, and holds an invisible microphone up to Ruben’s face. “Preach it.”

“…Huh?”

“He’s saying it’s your weekend to pick an activity,” Vanessa translates.

Ruben squirms his hand up his sleeve to pull out whatever fidget he put up there this morning. “Ugh. Do I have to?”

“Yes,” Vanessa says. “We all get a turn doing our thing, you’re the one who came up with the system, no-one to blame but yourself.”

“Did I? Well, I make terrible choices, we all know this, which is why I shouldn’t have this kind of responsibility so can’t we just skip me and do Usnavi?”

“Hey, if you want your weekend activity to be ‘doing Usnavi’, I ain’t got no problem with it,” Usnavi says. He turns to wink at an imaginary audience.

“You’re very medium-aware today,” Ruben observes.

“I’m a postmodern legend.”

“I told you last time, Ruben, there’s no wrong choices unless you choose an amateur improv show,” Vanessa says.

“I like amateur improv shows,” Usnavi says.

“Clearly. And you’re wrong.”

“I’m allergic to amateur improv,” Ruben says. “My second-hand embarrassment reflex is too powerful.”

“Then you definitely don’t want me to take your turn because that’s what we’ll end up doing if you don’t step up,” Usnavi says. “Come on, man, there’s loads of stuff round here you’d enjoy. We could go to the park again or there’s still about eight billion museums we’ve not done together or the aquarium or—oh,  _that_  was an interesting facial expression.”

Ruben quickly tries to make himself look normal again. “Aquarium?” he repeats.

“Our boy wild about that fish life?” Vanessa says, making a fish-adjacent kind of face and wiggling her fingers up in Rubens tangle toy so now both of them are indeed tangled in it.

“I remember we used to go to the one near Ma’s all the time when I was a kid,” Ruben reminisces. “Every weekend, she must have got so bored of it. Then we stopped, but for a while I was obsessed _.”_

_“_ Why’d you stop?”

Ruben tries to cast his mind back but two decades is a long time ago even without taking into account all the holes life has poked in his brain, so he’s got no idea. He shrugs. “I dunno. Maybe I just got into something else? It’d be fun to go back. Uh, that is, if you guys are interested?”

“Fish are my entire life and soul, hermoso.”

“I can chill with some sea bullshit for sure.”

“Cool,” Ruben says.

There’s something instantly transportive about walking through the aquarium doors. Ruben doesn’t remember much about being a very young kid, but he definitely, definitely remembers these colors and sounds and this atmosphere, even if he can’t access specifics. It takes active effort to not run around like a toddler: he channels the energy into bouncing on his toes in one spot instead.

“Excited?” Vanessa asks, and Ruben nods. “I bet you know everything about everything in here.”

“I know some stuff.”

They meander a while, till Vanessa pulls on his hand, pointing into one of the tanks.

“Come tell me about these freaky lil things,” she says. “They’re kinda cute.”

“Oh! Those are axolotls. They’re amazing. They’ve actually fuelled major progress in human stem cell research because of the similarities between their embryonic cells and ours. They retain a lot of the genetic mechanisms of our oldest ancestors from back when we hadn’t come out of the sea to be land-dwelling vertebrates yet.”

“Whaaaat, that’s so crazy,” she says. “Does that mean in a billion years these tiny little guys might be people? Which one do you think will be Usnavi? That one in the corner could rock a hat, I think him.”

“That’s not exactly how evolution works. But they definitely contributed a lot to our understanding of our own early development, and to our understanding of tissue regeneration. And they’re only native to Mexico, so, y’know, Latin America represent.”

“I wish I’d paid more attention to this biology shit in school, it’s way more interesting than I thought it was back then,” Vanessa muses.

Ruben beams. Science is great. Aquariums are great. What a great day.

It takes them forever to get round the first two rooms. If Vanessa and Usnavi are bothered it’s their own fault: they keep encouraging him and they know how Ruben gets when he’s on a roll. It feels good to just be interested for the wonder of it rather than for work. Vanessa asks a bunch of questions and Usnavi’s “what the fuuuck” faces escalate to ever more entertaining levels, which come to think of it might be  _why_ Vanessa keeps asking questions. Walking the corridor from the second room towards the third, he grabs Ruben’s arm.

“Ruben,” he whispers, worriedly, and gestures at nothing in particular with his other hand, “why is the ocean Like This?”

Vanessa pats him on the head. “This isn’t gonna be a repeat of that time we got blazed and he made you watch an episode of Blue Planet, is it?”

“Don’t remind me. My mind can barely cope with this shit sober, Highsnavi stood no chance.”

“I stand by it, the deep sea is  _incredible,”_  Ruben says. “The ways they’ve adapted to such hostile environments, it’s really something. Did you know there’s this fish called the black swallower - stop laughing, both of you - and it can eat things up to ten times its size because food is so scarce down there so they have to make it count? Sometimes they eat things so big that their stomach ruptures and it kills them.”

"That's how I wanna go out," Vanessa says.

Usnavi shudders. “I did not know that, but now I do it’ll never leave my nightmares, so thanks. My girl Moana must be  _trippin_ ’ to wanna sail on that shit, next time I go to Playa Rincon catch me way up on dry land deadass screaming at the ocean.”

“It’s not like you’re going to run into any off the coast of — oh!” Ruben says, stopping dead in the entrance of the next room and causing a brief pedestrian traffic jam. “ _Oh.”_

He hadn’t looked up what kind of animals they had at this place. Tiny surprises like “hey look an unexpectedly interesting anemone” are the only ones he can really enjoy without setting off his fight-or-flight. The unanticipated vividity of the memory this room brings up isn’t a bad surprise at all.

“Oh,  _seals_!” Vanessa exclaims, then clears her throat and scratches her arm awkwardly. “Uh, I mean. Cool, they’re fine.”

_“Aaaaaah_ ,” Usnavi says, putting both hands over his mouth. _“_ I take it all back, this is the kinda crowd I can hang with.”

Ruben says nothing, approaching the large window set into the enormous tank and putting his hand against the glass. One of the seals glides up to the window and noses curiously around where Ruben’s palm is resting. His entire brain turns to cotton candy. “Hey there. Hey, buddy! Hi!”

Another one joins it soon after, butting the first gently out of the way like it wants to get a better view and Ruben laughs, utterly delighted. Obviously it’s not the same ones he saw so often at the aquarium as a kid, but it feels like they recognise him anyway.

“Hace tiempo,” he says softly. “¿Me extrañaste?”

“Do you think one day he’ll look at  _us_  that way?” Vanessa asks Usnavi.

Ruben manages to tear his eyes away from the water. “They’re my favorite,” he explains.

“Makes sense,” Usnavi says. “You basically are one.”

“Thank you,” Ruben says. “What?”

“No, he’s got a point,” Vanessa says.

Both of them decline to explain any further. Ruben takes his hand off the glass, fingers trailing reluctantly. “Okay. What’s next?”

“Hey, no hurry, hermoso, we got all day.” Usnavi points at a bench set against the wall opposite the tank. “You wanna watch them for a bit longer?”

“Yes!” Ruben exclaims, clapping excitedly, then remembers that he’s an adult man who is here with other adults and should show some restraint.  _On the other hand_ , he argues to himself,  ** _seals_** , and it’s a very good point so he claps again. “I’d like that.”

Ruben would swear they've only been sitting there for a minute, but suddenly Usnavi’s shifting restlessly beside him and Vanessa’s standing up saying, “gonna stretch my legs, I’ll be back in a minute.”

He always used to lose time in this part of the aquarium. Checks his watch and stands too, startled. They’ve been there over half an hour. Oops. “Sorry! You should’ve poked me or something, I totally zoned out. We can go.”

“Sit the hell down,” Vanessa says. “We’re big grownup girls and boys, we can entertain ourselves while you have the family reunion."

“But—"

Vanessa just waves her hands ethereally in front of his face like she’s casting a spell on him and says, “be back soon, don’t go anywhere.”

Ruben shrugs, sits back down. It  _is_ his weekend, after all. He watches the seals drift around and play, their tails swishing. He wishes that were his life. Or at least wishes he could have one of these tanks installed in his apartment for when he need to destress, the ultimate visual stim. Maybe one for his office too. Usnavi pulls his phone out to start playing a game.

“If you’re bored—“

“I’m good,” Usnavi says, smiling at him. “You look so relaxed right now. If I’d knew it’d make you this zen I woulda brought you here like the first day we met.”

“Maybe we can come back some time?” Ruben says, hopefully.

“Of course,” Usnavi says. “Maybe not  _every_ weekend, but definitely soon. These guys are too cute to leave for long, anyway.”

“For sure, but they could fuck you up if they needed to, you know,” Ruben says. “Generally they’re very friendly but they’re actually really strong, if you get too much up in their space and make them feel threatened those teeth are  _sharp.”_

“Oh, so just a regular bunch of Rubens, huh?” Vanessa says, sliding onto the bench from out of nowhere on Ruben’s other side, holding a large paper bag with the aquarium’s logo embossed on it. She bops ruben in the face with it then sets it on his lap. “Got you a present from the gift shop, it reminded me of you.”

“For me? Thank you.” Ruben shakes the contents of the bag out. It’s a seal plushie. Not a harbor seal like the ones here but a baby harp seal, white and fluffy and nearly spherical.

Usnavi cracks the fuck up. “Look, it even has his beard!”

Ruben ignores him and pets the toy, feeling slightly overwhelmed. “Soft,” he murmurs.

“You like it, then?” Vanessa asks, smirking.

“He’s perfect,” Ruben says, choked up. “He’s so  _round.”_

**Author's Note:**

> hit me up on [tumblr](https://thisstableground.tumblr.com)


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